THE WOMAN from German TV was looking flustered. She ran ahead and beckoned her cameraman to shake a leg. She could barely keep up with the candidate. He moved down Parnell Street at the speed of light, a hand thrown out for a pump here, arms extended for a hug there. It was as if the candidate was jacked up on speed and everybody else was tearing after him in search of a slice of the action.

The woman from German TV had never seen anything like it as the scrum moved across the street into the Ilac Shopping Centre. The candidate was moving so fast, shaking and hugging, he simply couldn't have time to engage with the people whom he was greeting.

"This is ridiculous, " the woman from German TV said.

"How can hef" A sympathetic native pulled her aside and explained the ways of the world. "This is the Bertie way, " he said. "Bertie has perfected this campaigning routine where he keeps moving, hears no gripes, sees no embarrassment, speaks no depth. He just sprinkles his aura. It works."

So it went last Wedneday.

Except the candidate doing the Bertie hustle was Enda Kenny, the man who would be Taoiseach. A few years back, somebody in Fine Gael got out a video of Bertie Ahern on the campaign trail in Election '02.

Every detail was studied and noted.

Gone is the lumbering baldy bus that delivered Michael Noonan and Fine Gael to the edge of the abyss. In comes a Merc, two biofuel Tucsons and a nifty Mercedes minibus.

Vroom vroom, we're off.

Somebody in the party spotted that Enda had all the attributes for the Bertie hustle, and then some. He's a nice man, good looking, has a winning smile and is fitter than many half his age. They deconstructed him, put him together again, spun him sideways and threw in something a little new. Watch Enda's hands. He's always at them, rubbing in anticipation of the battle ahead, washing them with no soap, and most of all, pointing.

Nobody points into the future on the campaign trail like Enda Kenny. Bruce Springsteen is another great man for the pointing, out into the audience, sparking a frisson of excitement to any young woman in the orbit of his index finger's trajectory. Bill Clinton does it too to some effect. Now Enda has joined the gang, pointing at people and even things, because that's what superstars do.

Albert's ghost Last week, while Enda was busy being Bertie, the man himself was on another planet.

Or maybe it was just another country, the one called the past. It kept coming back at him. At times, it was wrapped in a warm glow of nostalgia, evoking his greatest achievements, and even his lineage in leading the country through turbulence.

There was the establishment of the executive in Northern Ireland, the final piece in a jigsaw painfully put together by Ahern and Tony Blair over the course of a decade. The Fianna Fail leader deserves much credit for the peace that has come dropping slowly.

He attended the annual commemoration of 1916 on Wednesday. From there, he went to view the last letter written by Padraig Pearse, a man whom Ahern patently reveres. It is to the revolutionary poet, rather than Eamon de Valera, that the Taoiseach traces back his lineage. Pearse has been posthumously signed up for the party.

The week ended on Friday at the Battle of the Boyne, hosting a visit from the new first minister and former harbinger of hate, Ian Paisley. Again, Ahern was in his element.

During the week's darker moments, the past hauled him back to Bertiegate I and a Michael McDowell strop. And then all the way back to the house on dodgy foundations and the living ghost of Albert Reynolds, smiling smugly at fate's greasy hand.

Albert gave an interview to the Eamon Keane Show on Newstalk 106 in which he accused Ahern of failing to pass on a file to him in 1994 that might have saved the Reynolds-led coalition with Labour. It was all so long ago nobody but The Irish Times seems to have remembered it, but the intervention spoke plenty about Reynolds' lingering bitterness towards Ahern and once again swung a spotlight, however fleetingly, on a time when Bertie was dealing in bags of cash, digouts and expensive refittings of a new abode.

Through it all, the campaigning dynamo of 2002 was nowhere to be found. He seems to have defected to Fine Gael and snatched the body of Enda Kenny. When Ahern did hit the trail, his customary zest was absent, as if he was unable to shake from his system some bug or ailment that wouldn't leave him alone.

McDowell didn't help. The drowning man grasped at a ship called integrity for his latest gimmick. On Sunday, he told Bertie to tell all about his finances or the partnership would be dissolved. By Wednesday, when it had become obvious that this was a gimmick too far, Mac was rowing back into calm waters.

Others around Ahern did no favours for themselves.

While McDowell sulked, the three who would be king, Brian Cowen, Micheal Martin and Dermot Ahern, came out with guns blazing, shooting, for the most part, below the belt. Martin all but used the infamous phrase "the hounding of an honourable man", as coined by Ahern himself a decade ago about poor Ray Burke, before the latter was exposed as a crook.

All of their leader's travails were down to Fine Gael dirty tricks, the three boys inferred.

That silly contention was traced back to a casual conversation Enda Kenny had with a PD hack a few weeks ago. Enda said something about a bombshell on Day 21;

the hack, Mark Costigan, somehow constructed this to imply Fine Gael would dish dirt on that day. As spin goes, it reached down into the gutter.

Make or break Noel Ahern went for a roll around in that gutter the following day, attempting to portray legitimate interest in the brother's cash-rich lifestyle as dirty tricks.

"I don't know who's behind it. I don't have any evidence.

We would say it's someone in Fine Gael at a high level, " he told Newstalk, before invoking the memory of his mother to spread muck. "My mother passed away some years ago.

I'm glad she's not around today to listen to some of it."

In Fianna Fail eyes, there is no problem with the leader being involved in, at the very least, highly unorthodox financial transactions. Attempts to illuminate such behaviour, however, are a dark threat to democracy. As a tactic, it is straight out of the despot's manual.

By Friday, an opinion poll was showing a bounce for the Soldiers of Destiny. They're up 2%, even if 72% of respondents felt Ahern still had some answering to do. Next week is make or break for the great campaigner. The statement about his finances for McDowell's benefit will have to come soon. One rumour suggests it will give clear answers in the English language, but don't bet on it.

Meanwhile, out on the stump, coursing through the people of Ireland, the spirit of Bertie '02 is alive and dangerous. Enda is groomed and buffed and spun within an inch of his life. And he is making inroads, seducing some voters into believing that fate and his right index finger are pointing him all the way to the top of the tree. It's not over by a long shot yet.