here is an ancient Celtic tribal maxim:
''Where the O'Neill sits, that is the head of the table.''
Move that up a few centuries to the context of presidential politics, and the situation of another era's Celtic (OK, Scotch-Irish) warrior, and weave in the poll numbers:
''Where John McCain sits, he sits with 23 percent of the electorate.'' One American in four would still like McCain in the White House, according to the NBC numbers, even though he has folded his tent and trudged dutifully, if belatedly, into the the tent of his victorious rival, George W. Bush.
That was not so much a bury-the-hatchet pow-wow as a tactical concession to a foe who won the primary battle but not the ideological war. McCain did the grown-up thing. He showed up, grinned - or was that a grimace? - and said all the right things. The old flyboy who had learned how to put on a mask for his captors in Hanoi did it again.
If you follow McCain, as many of us did with growing interest even before his remarkable insurgency of last winter and early spring, you know how to read the body language. The lips were saying yes-yes-yes, but the heart strings were saying nah-nah-nah.
For McCain to have any future in the Republican Party nationally as presently constituted, he could do nothing less than he did Tuesday in Pittsburgh. He didn't bury the hatchet, he just sheathed it and and put it in his knapsack in case he needs it again.
But old Johnny McCain didn't toss his ax. It's in the satchel, next to the canteen, the Bowie knife, his blanket, and his compass, ready when need be.
Still the cheeky midshipman, the rookie pilot thumbing his nose at the rules, the harum-scarum junior jet jockey climbing over the wall after Taps to run into town and tear up a biker bar, McCain surrendered formally to Bush with the sort of winks and grins and wisecracks and shrugs that marked his previous visits to various woodsheds.
All I needed to hear was ''I endorse Governor Bush'' intoned six consecutive times, with varying accent, cadence, eye-rolling, shoulder-shrugging, etc. That was classic McCain. Hauled into the principal's office, lectured that he has to say out loud what the principal demands, he says it six times over, playing to the audience with impish spontaneity that made it easier for him to publicly swallow the ''medicine'' he dreads.
He swallowed the castor oil, but you could tell he gagged. Saying ''uncle'' is not easy for a fellow who resolutely remained in the Hanoi Hilton rather than jump ahead of longer-serving POWs in the waiting-to-be-repatriated line. But his handlers and his coterie of senior advisers had clearly prevailed in the battle to persuade McCain to swallow his pride and pay fealty to Bush and keep himself and his ambitions alive in the Republican Party.
The GOP is a hierarchal party. Republicans are outnumbered by Democrats overall and need party discipline and order to win. It is an axiom of national politics that intraparty feuds allow the other party to win, which happened twice in succession in '76 and '80. Ronald Reagan's limp embrace doomed President Ford's reelection. Ted Kennedy's hollow endorsement of President Carter is blamed by the Georgian for his humiliation.
All those senators, congressmen, and governors who lined up behind Bush early and then gasped as he lost seven primaries to McCain in the early going were demanding that McCain do the right thing by the party regulars and knuckle under. He did. But, as is so typical of McCain, he did it his way: wink, blink, a wisecrack here, an eye roll there, and you'd have to be pretty obtuse not to catch his drift.
From Bush's perspective, he got the endorsement he wanted, McCain did him a favor by taking himself out of the running for vice president, and both men managed an awkward situation with sufficient requisite dignity and grace. There's no love lost between this pair, and it would be difficult to cobble together a ticket without major change of hearts in both parties.
No doubt McCain is sincere in preferring Bush to a President Al Gore. No doubt McCain wishes the House and Senate to remain in GOP hands. But I watched closely as McCain, straight-faced, choked out the following: ''Governor Bush is the most qualified person to be president of the United States. He has the vision, he has the knowledge and the expertise to carry out the mission of maintaining United States supremacy, both militarily and economically, in the world.''
I thought John was being - well, how do I put it? Clintonesque is the term I grope for. Not exactly disingenuous, perhaps. Wishing it were true, maybe? There was a point last spring when, having been fanged by the Bush operation, McCain compared Bush to Clinton, which in turn triggered an outburst of huffing and puffing and well-I-never from the Texas governor. But then, Clintonism was never confined to just Clinton, was it?
I count myself an early and enthusiastic backer of McCain and his reform agenda. But when I hear my man saying, ''Governor Bush is the most qualified person to be president of the United States,'' period, I think my friend John is stretching it. Like, from here to El Paso.
I tend to believe most McCain political claims, not doubting his sincerity even where we part company (abortion and guns, to mention two forks in the road.) But I also believe my eyes, which tell me Bush is nowhere near ready to lead this country. And because I believe my eyes, I can't believe my ears when I hear McCain saying what he felt he had to say.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
