Today is Brian Cowan’s 300th day as Taoiseach.
It’s symptomatic of his reign that today, the door fell off a minister’s helicopter as it left a tourism conference.
Brian Cowen’s reign just can’t seem to achieve takeoff.
He was elected, as far as I can tell, because he was great crack altogether. He became the front runner to succeed Bertie Ahern simply because he could hold a note and a song.
His time in charge has been marked with disasters, from losing the Lisbon referendum to the botched budget, and scandals in FÁS and Anglo-Irish Bank.
It didn’t help that those scandals affected the departments of his two closest associates, Mary Coughlan and Brian Lenihan.
Both seem to have got their jobs not on ability, but because they were his best mates. Like him, they are the children of TDs.
Cowen’s first Ard Fheis speech, yet another attempt at a State of the Nation address, seems to have underwhelmed the population.
But he suffers from constant comparisons to Barack Obama, and can’t even organise a website launch.
Cowen is still two months away from the first anniversary of his ascension.
And ticking away in the background is the Mahon report.
