Last week, Bill Clinton made his first presidential visit to a faraway state of which most Americans know very little. The name of this neglected backwater? Nebraska. That a relatively large chunk of his own country had not had the pleasure of his company while Ireland was to receive him for the third time marks the disproportionate role of this little island in Clinton's psyche.
He is certainly the best US President Ireland ever had - and, in a sense, the best President America never had, which tells us much about why Clinton is here.
We tend to exaggerate Ireland's real importance in the landscape of American politics and to assume that Clinton's fascination with Ireland lies merely in the arithmetic of electoral advantage.
But that is false. For one thing, most Irish-Americans are Protestants who do not belong to the Wrap the Green Flag Round Me brigade. For another, Americans simply don't vote on the basis of foreign policy issues. In recent polls, just 2 per cent of US voters said they would be swayed by the candidates' stances on foreign or defence policy.
Whatever small electoral advantage Clinton may have gained from his devotion to the Irish peace process could hardly begin to make up for the sheer tedium of late-night phone calls from Irish politicians bitching about each other. If there is such a thing as the opposite of phone sex, a conference call on the joys of cross-Border bodies might well be it.
So why has Clinton chosen to come here for his last presidential visit abroad? For an answer, it is best to look at what he left behind when he flew out last night. The crisis of political legitimacy being played out in the US over the last month is a dramatic expression of the forces that have prevented Clinton from really functioning as President.
Last year, in their book Politics By Other Means, Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter wrote that in America "elections have become less decisive as mechanisms for resolving conflicts and constituting governments . . . Rather than engage in all-out competition for votes, contending political forces have come to rely upon such weapons of institutional combat as congressional investigations, media revelations and judicial proceedings to defeat their foes."
THE spectacle of the US presidency being decided in the courts bears this out in the most lurid way imaginable. But it is merely the working out in formal terms of what happened to Clinton. His opponents never really accepted that being elected twice entitled him to be President. They proceeded to contest the results through a raft of investigations, leading to the attempted coup that was his impeachment.
In a valedictory interview in the current Rolling Stone, Clinton throws a fascinating light on the psychological dynamics of this process. He sees the intensity of Republican animosity towards him as arising from a sense of ethnic betrayal. He defines himself as a "white Southern Protestant", at one level, a redneck good ol' boy of the kind supposed to be the backbone of reactionary conservatism. That makes him, for conservatives, something much worse than an enemy - a traitor.
The Republicans, he says, had "worked very hard to have the old white, male Southern culture dominate the political life of America. And they saw me as an apostate - which I welcome. When I take on the NRA [the National Rifle Association] or do something for gay rights, to them it's worse if I do it. It's like a Catholic being pro-choice."
What's striking in all of this is not just the subtlety and intelligence of Clinton's analysis of his own situation but the words and notions that he reaches for in trying to understand it: Protestant, Catholic, apostate. In seeing his own troubles as the playing out of a whole set of tensions about what it means to be a "white Southern Protestant" he also points to what has made Northern Ireland so genuinely interesting for him.
Here was a place in which the very quality that got him into such grief at home - the ability to move outside a particular religious and ethnic stereotype - could be not just useful but also liberating.
He discovered a situation where breaking the rigid link between political ideology and ethnic identity was patently a good idea. And he knew what it was like both to be a Protestant backwoodsman, looked down on by smart liberals, and to be a political apostate, reviled as a slimy, untrustworthy traitor.
And strangely, he got to play with big ideas, with political visions on what ought to be a presidential scale. Clinton's tragedy, as the most naturally gifted politician of his generation, is that as President he allowed himself to be so worn down by the visceral hatred he evoked that he effectively abandoned large-scale policies for the micro-politics of small issues advocated by his one-time handler, the appalling Dick Morris.
Weirdly, it was only in Ireland and a few other foreign countries that he got to deal in the epoch-making stuff of history. Since this is where he got to be President, it is only right that this is where he should conclude his presidency.
fotoole@irish-times.ie