By NiallO’Dowd

YOU can usually tell a lot about a politician by how his staffers act around him. The more clueless the candidate the more likely the staff are to fuss and cluck and insist on overseeing every minute detail of his or her appearances.

There is one particular politician of my acquaintance who regularly drives his staff nuts. They are clearly in deep fear of him and the demands and the hysterics get worse as the occasion nears. Little wonder he is likely to spend his career in well-deserved obscurity.

On the other hand, you always get a keen sense from the staffers when a candidate is perfectly comfortable in his or her skin, and is willing to take on whatever challenges the event will bring.

Senator John McCain is definitely counted among the latter. Last Friday night the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR), which I chair, hosted the senator at a town hall meeting in Woodlawn attended by close to 2,000 people.

McCain arrived early, without fanfare, stepping out of the back of a town car at around 5:45 p.m. He is smaller in stature than what you might imagine, but for a man approaching 70 years old who has undergone incredible hardship in his life, he is spry, fit and clearly on top of his game.

He had come to address the Irish because ILIR had impressed him mightily during their lobbying day in Washington on March 8. The reception hereceived that day at the ILIR rally had almost raised the roof.

His staffers later stated that he said he felt like a rock star. It was a good omen that he was back again, this time in the Irish heartland of Woodlawn.

It was a grand occasion. American and Irish flags flew, the crowd were in full song and the “Fields of Athenry” got the kind of airing usually reserved for Irish international soccer matches. In the midst of all the hullabaloo McCain seemed perfectly at ease.

Beforehand there were little or no demands from his staff. There was no attempt to pre-screen the questions from the audience, and there was a sense that McCain was more than willing to face whatever questions, good or bad, that were flung from the audience.

That proved to be the case, though there was lots of good humor around the fact that many of the questions, delivered in strong Irish accents, had to essentially be translated for the Arizona senator who could not catch what was being said.

When you meet McCain in person it becomes evident why his staff are so relaxed. There seems remarkably little ego. He grasps your hand firmly, makes eye contact and isn’t looking around the room for the next most important person to talk to, a dreaded disease many politicians suffer from.

When you have endured terrible torture in a North Vietnamese prison, when your very life was at stake for every day for five and a half years in a hideous prison camp, you learn not to worry about such trivial matters as what you may face at a political event.

McCain speaks plainly, so plainly you would not take him for a politician if you did not know him. He answers every question, which is why he has become such a media favorite in an era when every answer is poll tested to a fault.

He is one of the few politicians, perhaps the only one, who can reach across to the other side of the aisle and not appear to polarize American politics like George W. Bush and, before him, Bill Clinton did. For that reason alone he is a very serious player for 2008 and right now has to be ranked the front runner.

Certainly based on what we saw in the Bronx last Friday, he is a worthy favorite. If he delivers on immigration reform he will definitely have many Irish Americans in his corner.