Most politicians, running for the local sanitation board or the White House, enjoy stabbing a palm into a sea of fingers. But it's not painless.

Glad-handing is tough on the hands. It's grimy too. Rows of outstretched hands -- cold, clammy, sweaty and coated with germs -- all waiting to be gripped by a grinning politician.

Well, not Donald Trump. The billionaire presidential contender, who has a germ phobia, doesn't like the greeting ritual. He keeps antiseptic hand wipes in his limousine, and earlier this month passed out little bottles of Purell hand sanitizer stamped with his campaign web address to reporters in Beverly Hills, Calif.

"One of the curses of American society is the simple act of shaking hands. I happen to be a clean-hands freak," he said.

Publicly, politicians espouse their love for connecting with the voters. Mano a mano. Flesh to flesh. Privately, Trump isn't the only politician to grab for a Sani-Cloth.

Elizabeth Dole has used them in her car to cleanse her hands after campaign stops. But the chance for infection never kept her from shaking hands -- young, old, chapped, sticky or still damp from doing dishes.

"I've gone up to people who have said `Oh, I'm sorry, my hands are wet,"' Dole said. She shakes them anyway. "You just do it and move on."

President Clinton uses the germicidal hand wipes too, but he was too hungry to worry about germs one night during the 1992 campaign when he stopped at watering hole in Dorchester, Mass.

On the way to the car, a woman handed him a home-baked pie.

"He was hungry and he just tore into it with his hand," said a close Clinton friend who was there.

Clinton is an exuberant hand-shaker who extends both arms into a crowd to grab and squeeze supporters' arms, hands, fingers.

It comes with the job, says Vice President Al Gore.

"When you do it as much as I do, no it doesn't hurt," Gore said.

To avoid injury, some politicians grab only the fingers of an outstretched hand to bypass the knuckle-crunch. If a burly man approaches, Bradley tries to be the first to squeeze.

"Some guys like to crush your hand," Bradley said, eyeing a right mitt large enough to palm a basketball. "The idea is to get there quick if it's a big guy. Get there first and you have a chance to control the grip."

Says Bush: "After months of campaigning, my hands are now in pretty good handshaking shape -- as long as no one tries a vise-grip. I'm good for 1,000 or 1,200 shakes a day before redness and swelling set in."

American political history is full of stories about sore hands.

In 1863, President Lincoln worried his signature on the Emancipation Proclamation would appear shaky because he had just spent more than three hours shaking hands at an annual New Year's Day reception at the White House. "When the pen touched the page, he did not hesitate, but the signature did show the effects of a little tremor in the aching hand," writes presidential historian William Seale.

John F. Kennedy's right hand looked like it had been clawed by a cat after he greeted plant workers one frosty morning in Wisconsin in 1960. Kennedy aide David Powers wrote afterward: "We noticed that Jack's bare right hand, swollen and blue from the cold, was scratched and bleeding. Its flesh had been torn in many places by the fingernails scraped against it in hurried handshakes."

President Johnson enjoyed handshaking, but even the broad-shouldered Texan suffered.

"I remember once in Norway, his hands were all bloody," Bart McDowell, a National Geographic writer who accompanied then-Vice President Johnson on the trip, said during an oral history interview. "His knuckles were actually bleeding because he said the Norwegian boys all wanted to shake hands so hard."

Political wives feel the pain too.

Mamie Eisenhower mentioned it in a letter to a friend shortly after Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president. "After yesterday's 1,300, Friday's 3,000, Thursday's 1,200, the right member is a little weak," she wrote.

President Theodore Roosevelt shook hands with a record 8,150 people at the New Year's Day open house at the White House in 1907, according to Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris.

Afterward, he wrote, Roosevelt retired upstairs to "privately, disgustedly, scrub himself clean."