History . . . measured in bombings, emigrants, GDP growth or number of U2 tracks sold on iTunes . . . suggests that John F Kennedy's watch was running about 40 years fast that day in Dublin. But Kennedy's phrase . . . deployed by Bertie Ahern at Westminster and then in Thursday's debate with Enda Kenny . . .

still stirs the blood. It's "the vision thing". It does make you wonder, though.

Why is the closest facsimile to "the vision thing" on offer from either potential taoiseach a 44-year-old import?

Imports aren't necessarily bad.

Ireland imports lots of things. Like our prosperity. The full story is more complicated, but in simple terms, the IDA lured foreign companies here. They created the productivity-boosting jobs that brought prosperity.

The politicians just about managed to get out of the way.

In this election, when they talk about jobs, the political parties . . . including the PDs, who should know better . . .compete on promises to "bring" more jobs to Ireland.

But what globalisation giveth, globalisation can taketh away.

To their credit, the leaders of all of the main parties at least say that they understand this and don't want to screw things up.

A real set of "next steps" (that the last slide of a management consultant's bog standard PowerPoint presentation can be a political platform is surely the most embarrassing sign of our vision-deficit) would surely make some reference to ideas for getting the Irish-owned part of the economy into gear before more multinationals get itchy feet.

But given that it was the decision to give up a lot of control . . . or the illusion of control . . . that brought prosperity in the first place, by taking off the table the ability of Dublin politicians to mess up the currency, interest rates and taxes on work and business, it's now hard for politicians even to talk about ways to jumpstart the indigenous economy and what Ireland should look like in another 10 years.

It also means that in the post-match analysis of last Thursday's debate, fans of political rhetoric inevitably mourned the absence of "the vision thing". The debate wasn't about vision of where we're going, however. It was about competence . . . whether the voters could trust Enda Kenny not to crash the car if we let him take the wheel.

Given that we don't actually want to go anywhere, we just want to hear the engine purr a little more melodiously and a bit faster in circles around the Celtic cul-de-sac, he may get an L-plate premiership.

The unanswered question, however, is whether Kenny can summon "the vision thing" if circumstances change. Kennedy had definite ideas about how the US should meet the challenges of his time . . . ideas that would be controversial even now . . .

and could make his own the fine phrases that would carry his country along with him.

Kennedy also benefited from something else . . . an X factor, a mystique, that made people more willing to listen and follow. It was no accident.

Kennedy wasn't just a master of words, but of images. We know now that Kennedy was a philandering cad with serious Daddy issues and a degenerative disease he hid and self-medicated. But images of the young, vigorous war hero and his loving family with beautiful wife and children on show, symbolising the best of what the country had to offer, were essential to his appeal.

He captured imaginations by mastering the emergent media of the day . . . television.

Centralised control of message and image, essential to the mythmaking of politicial communications of the day, was . . . briefly . . . possible.

Modern politicians can't have that advantage. Visit the website YouTube and watch Fine Gael's party political broadcast. What comes next is, in the inscrutable logic of the website's software, recommended videos from a series titled 'Ask a Gay Man'.

Fianna Fail's video doesn't fare much better. It's 'related videos' include episodes of Brass Eye, titled 'Random Sex' and 'Masturbation'.

Without any control of the context where a message is delivered, it's difficult at best to summon the authority required for "the vision thing".

Until someone figures out a way to do that in the controlfree world we live in, we'll probably keep on quoting Kennedy and strike a pose of competence. Hopefully that will be enough for tougher times.