Voting for the CoP
15/11/07 22:06 Filed in: Musing
or,
How I participated in the electoral process and made no difference
at all
I had a choice, here in St James, between two brassy, black women and I picked the one with the doctorate and the commitment to making Spanish a viable language in Trinidad and Tobago.
It wasn't the first time that it was easy to decline the PNM option in my constituency of Port of Spain South, but it was one of the few times that it looked like another party stood a halfway decent chance of actually beating the party incumbent.
Pleased with the UNC's moves to acknowledge the importance of technology on the national agenda, I dropped a stamp for them early in their political reign, but that was before they so publicly embraced the politics of creative accounting and Mr Panday became the absolutist of today.
Nobody votes for just the representation in their district, in fact, I suspect that most people don't even care who is representing them, just that they wear the correct logo on their China-made jersey.
So in the larger context of party, what was the difference? Patrick Manning seemed to be reading the value of the Basdeo Panday playbook closely, dumping large swaths of his existing political lineup just weeks before the elections, moving many veterans capable of giving him lip off the political platform and focusing on a younger, far more inexperienced and readily impressed group of contenders.
Look at the new Cabinet. Apart from his wife, who among these admiring neophytes is going to stand up in a Cabinet meeting and tell Mr Manning that he's wrong?
Backtrack to the beginning
But I'm getting ahead of myself, I was still trying to let you see the election options from my point of view.
The UNC, once a promising alternative government had crippled its position with a raft of corruption accusations, a petulant attitude that lasted years after they lost the 2001 election.
Mr Panday's management of the party over the last two years was particularly appalling. No legitimate successor for the Panday leadership escaped unscathed, with the most notorious hammering being reserved for Winston Dookeran, who was drummed out of the party with an enthusiasm and venom that was premeditated and cruel.
There were some intriguing moments in the CoP campaign, which evolved with surprising speed from token effort to potential threat over just a few weeks. I recall the moment when I seriously thought that Mr Dookeran could get my vote.
It was a clip from the party's first big rally at Independence Square, a coming out fete for the party's ambitions and as Mr Dookeran was walking through the crowds, he looked around with a kind of wonder. You could almost see him thinking, "We have balloons? When did we get balloons?"
I saw something of that same look on his face as he made his concession speech, that "We got no seats? Not even one?" look.
I think that's why so many people liked the Dooks for Prime Minister and gave his whole party the time of day for more than four weeks. It was that curious sense that the right man to put in power might be the man who didn't show any evidence of craving it.
Mr Panday's venomous attack on the CoP and its leader was particularly appalling, even after his craven, decidedly noninclusive Election Saturday calls to his base to "stand tall" (against which oppressors, exactly, Bas?).
Pre-emptively laying the blame for everything criminal to come at the feet of the CoP, its leader and supporters, Mr Panday managed to skip any mention in his speech about how the CoP came to be and his heavy-handed leveraging of the end Mr Dookeran's departure.
What we're left with now
Close to 150,000 other people were either so moved by the CoP's fuzzy but hopeful rhetoric or so repulsed by their other choices that they voted for the new party.
But the UNC pulled close to 200,000 votes and the PNM grabbed almost 300,000 in spreads that were particularly graphic in the Guardian's post-election day map of the country's new vote distribution, which positioned T&T as a yellow-band maxi, with a broad stripe of UNC colour right through its middle and double bands of PNM across its top and bottom.
I don't have much sympathy for politicians. The best of them tend to be failures at capturing the popular vote and the worst of them I wouldn't wish on a mangy, rabid dog. The ones between tend to range between somewhat embarrassing and mildly troubling in their efforts to be all things to all the people of this country while they wrestle with temptations and political pressures that turn their moral compasses into quite handy little fans.
But I do worry about what politicians create in their supporters, the bubbling overconfidence in their government that is typical of hardcore PNM supporters lately, the fermenting bitterness of UNC voters after their brief turn in office and what must be the crushing disappointment of the thousands who turned up to support the CoP.
There's always a percentage of those folks who find the nation intolerable after a defeat. PNM people fled the UNC in power; UNC people lined up at the Canadian embassy to plead for political asylum when it seemed that the PNM would reign forever.
Of the 150,000 voters who, like me, voted for a political phantom, it seems reasonable to expect a percentage to throw in the towel. But I have a sense that these were exactly the people that we need in the political process, the free thinkers willing to consider a third political force who refuse the traditional and increasingly fetid political options. That I ended up one of them for a few seconds on election day only cements my opinion that we must be the cream of the crop. If some of those folks are like me, they probably aren't CoP people any more than they were PNM or UNC people, but they were willing to be swayed by political rhetoric that had a greater emphasis on human decency than on the more successful reality of political cut and thrust.
There's latent power in failure
At this point, I have little confidence in the CoP's capability to pick themselves up after being essentially ignored by a critical mass of the voting public, shake Mr Panday's terrible associations, turn aside the condescending sneering of the PNM faithful and consolidate themselves into a viable citizen movement to which anyone in power would be inclined to pay attention.
The ONR wrestled with this problem and failed, only getting a renewed lease on life when it allied with the ANR Robinson-led DAC and Panday's ULF to become the National Alliance for Reconstruction. When that spit and bailing wire coalition crumbled, it took every hope of representative, race-blind politics with it.
Statistically, voting participation has increased by roughly 50,000 persons over each of the last three elections. Voter turnout for 2001 was roughly 560,000, in 2002 it rose to around 608,000.
The 2007 elections pulled 653,000 voters, so it's hard to even attribute the rise in voter turnout to the CoP, which began a useful trend of appealing to young voters with a strong Internet presence.
Mr Manning trumped that by dumping a decisive number of PNM stalwarts and replacing them with much younger (and more politically naive) faces. Mr Panday's party hired Orange Sky, producing a wonderfully cynical video that ran in the two days leading up to the election that positioned Mr Rojas as a Pied Piper leading the orange-clad young out of PNM degradation into halcyon fields of green.
I'm a big believer in the vote and in the electoral process as I wrote here and here for the Guardian's editorial space.
I don't actually think that the party we elect into power has as much of an effect on the way this country proceeds as their political leaders would have us think. Trinidad and Tobago is firmly entrenched in the global economy and there are certain processes and procedures that must be followed for us to remain in the catbird seat as a supplier of oil and gas. It's in the details, the little nuances that create quality of life that were comprehensively ignored for most of the October campaign that we find crucial points of leverage.
Troubling clouds gather
The PNM's outrageous contempt for agriculture, for instance, has much greater repercussions than simply the closure of Caroni and the near collapse of local farming efforts. It diverts valuable engineering and inventive resources away from food production, which should be at the core of any thinking society with arable land, to the more effective stripping of a finite natural resource from the earth we happen to be situated on top of.
Yes, we should make the most of high oil and gas prices while they last and create industries that, should they actually be well managed, can continue to leverage our natural resources if prices drop or our capacity to export should become diminished through accelerated exploitation.
Having two Universities which have essentially thrown their doors open to all comers is also a good thing, but all these bright, allegedly educated people emerging from newly egalitarian halls of academia should be tasked with solving the nation's problems, which expand in scope and complexity as we radiate outward from the oilbelt and the safety of offshore installations.
What is the solution for the nightly terrors of Laventille, which is as far from the wellhead as it gets?
We're in a curious space right now, one that's a bit unsettling for anyone who hasn't drunk a willing and heady draft of the PNM's tasty beverage.
Mr Manning has pretty much literally set the stage for his next five years, dragging the President out of the dilapidation of President's House to swear him (and only him) in at Woodford Square, a break from tradition that cost a fortune, brought no relief to the growing rot at the primary residence of the titular President and reinforced the new PM as a "people's leader" regardless of the consequences for the Treasury, tradition or taste.
This week, his new, neophyte team is in coaching sessions to learn the PNM way of government and those new Ministers have a remarkable opportunity to do things differently, though I have no hope at all than any such thing is likely to happen.
More than 20 percent of the electorate chose the CoP as their party of choice and now have no representation at all. Mr Panday has resolutely denigrated these voters as all but traitors and Mr Manning's plans for this large swath of the voting public remain unclear.
Mr Manning has demonstrated that he is willing to make changes to his administration in the face of a mounting electoral threat, but his capacity for confidence is evidently unquenchable. At every point when he could have said to have peaked in his assessment of himself, he has merely notched a piton and scaled to another level.
What's next for the PNM faithless?
The responsibility for the next five years of PNM rule do not lie with the Opposition UNC or the shattered CoP, this is our challenge. The UNC under Mr Panday is a wounded, feral beast which snarls terribly and chews cannibalistically at its own wounds, but is demonstrably incapable of unseating the PNM (despite Mr Panday's claims of vote-splitting, the statistics do not overwhelmingly support this argument) and has been reluctant to form a working alternate government.
Staggering under the weight of the money spent on balloons and other election related debts, the CoP will have to scale back far to become the grassroots movement is began as. Better to declare bankruptcy, fold those tents and banners and let the young people regroup under new leadership, perhaps with Mr Dookeran as an elder wiseman, consulting on the process.
What I'd really like to see, is an abandonment of the futile party stoking activities in favour of work that might actually fill the gaps that exist in civil society.
I'd like to see watchdog groups spring up on the Internet that report on the activities of each Minister and Ministry (and Shadow Minister, if the UNC ever gets around to being an Opposition again), what's happening in Parliament and in the Senate (now available, for the most part, on television for the convenience of armchair observers), what's happening with public projects that consume vast sums of public money, analysis of impenetrable reports, legalese, data sets and other public information that's deliberately written and prepared in such a way as to defy casual comment or analysis.
Yes, this should be the job of the media, but I'm not going to go there, because I'm actively involved in this communications forum and any energy I expend of lamenting its failings would be far better spent on improving its capacity.
Much of this watchdog work can be initiated for far less than the cost of the soft drinks that catered any single political rally on any night during the elections, but it calls for a commitment on the part of intelligent people to force transparency and public understanding on a process that's designed to defy casual observation.
There are people doing some of this now. Raymond Ramcharitar's unrestrained sarcasm and general nihilism is available on his blog, a savvy commentator is watching a lot of local television and a scattering of newspapers on another blog, but there is more that can and should be done.
There is room for rumour/scandal sites that gather information that's been surreptitiously obtained, but a ground up, Internet based movement like this would be far more impressive if it sported signed work.
I had a choice, here in St James, between two brassy, black women and I picked the one with the doctorate and the commitment to making Spanish a viable language in Trinidad and Tobago.
It wasn't the first time that it was easy to decline the PNM option in my constituency of Port of Spain South, but it was one of the few times that it looked like another party stood a halfway decent chance of actually beating the party incumbent.
Pleased with the UNC's moves to acknowledge the importance of technology on the national agenda, I dropped a stamp for them early in their political reign, but that was before they so publicly embraced the politics of creative accounting and Mr Panday became the absolutist of today.
Nobody votes for just the representation in their district, in fact, I suspect that most people don't even care who is representing them, just that they wear the correct logo on their China-made jersey.
So in the larger context of party, what was the difference? Patrick Manning seemed to be reading the value of the Basdeo Panday playbook closely, dumping large swaths of his existing political lineup just weeks before the elections, moving many veterans capable of giving him lip off the political platform and focusing on a younger, far more inexperienced and readily impressed group of contenders.
Look at the new Cabinet. Apart from his wife, who among these admiring neophytes is going to stand up in a Cabinet meeting and tell Mr Manning that he's wrong?
Backtrack to the beginning
But I'm getting ahead of myself, I was still trying to let you see the election options from my point of view.
The UNC, once a promising alternative government had crippled its position with a raft of corruption accusations, a petulant attitude that lasted years after they lost the 2001 election.
Mr Panday's management of the party over the last two years was particularly appalling. No legitimate successor for the Panday leadership escaped unscathed, with the most notorious hammering being reserved for Winston Dookeran, who was drummed out of the party with an enthusiasm and venom that was premeditated and cruel.
There were some intriguing moments in the CoP campaign, which evolved with surprising speed from token effort to potential threat over just a few weeks. I recall the moment when I seriously thought that Mr Dookeran could get my vote.
It was a clip from the party's first big rally at Independence Square, a coming out fete for the party's ambitions and as Mr Dookeran was walking through the crowds, he looked around with a kind of wonder. You could almost see him thinking, "We have balloons? When did we get balloons?"
I saw something of that same look on his face as he made his concession speech, that "We got no seats? Not even one?" look.
I think that's why so many people liked the Dooks for Prime Minister and gave his whole party the time of day for more than four weeks. It was that curious sense that the right man to put in power might be the man who didn't show any evidence of craving it.
Mr Panday's venomous attack on the CoP and its leader was particularly appalling, even after his craven, decidedly noninclusive Election Saturday calls to his base to "stand tall" (against which oppressors, exactly, Bas?).
Pre-emptively laying the blame for everything criminal to come at the feet of the CoP, its leader and supporters, Mr Panday managed to skip any mention in his speech about how the CoP came to be and his heavy-handed leveraging of the end Mr Dookeran's departure.
What we're left with now
Close to 150,000 other people were either so moved by the CoP's fuzzy but hopeful rhetoric or so repulsed by their other choices that they voted for the new party.
But the UNC pulled close to 200,000 votes and the PNM grabbed almost 300,000 in spreads that were particularly graphic in the Guardian's post-election day map of the country's new vote distribution, which positioned T&T as a yellow-band maxi, with a broad stripe of UNC colour right through its middle and double bands of PNM across its top and bottom.
I don't have much sympathy for politicians. The best of them tend to be failures at capturing the popular vote and the worst of them I wouldn't wish on a mangy, rabid dog. The ones between tend to range between somewhat embarrassing and mildly troubling in their efforts to be all things to all the people of this country while they wrestle with temptations and political pressures that turn their moral compasses into quite handy little fans.
But I do worry about what politicians create in their supporters, the bubbling overconfidence in their government that is typical of hardcore PNM supporters lately, the fermenting bitterness of UNC voters after their brief turn in office and what must be the crushing disappointment of the thousands who turned up to support the CoP.
There's always a percentage of those folks who find the nation intolerable after a defeat. PNM people fled the UNC in power; UNC people lined up at the Canadian embassy to plead for political asylum when it seemed that the PNM would reign forever.
Of the 150,000 voters who, like me, voted for a political phantom, it seems reasonable to expect a percentage to throw in the towel. But I have a sense that these were exactly the people that we need in the political process, the free thinkers willing to consider a third political force who refuse the traditional and increasingly fetid political options. That I ended up one of them for a few seconds on election day only cements my opinion that we must be the cream of the crop. If some of those folks are like me, they probably aren't CoP people any more than they were PNM or UNC people, but they were willing to be swayed by political rhetoric that had a greater emphasis on human decency than on the more successful reality of political cut and thrust.
There's latent power in failure
At this point, I have little confidence in the CoP's capability to pick themselves up after being essentially ignored by a critical mass of the voting public, shake Mr Panday's terrible associations, turn aside the condescending sneering of the PNM faithful and consolidate themselves into a viable citizen movement to which anyone in power would be inclined to pay attention.
The ONR wrestled with this problem and failed, only getting a renewed lease on life when it allied with the ANR Robinson-led DAC and Panday's ULF to become the National Alliance for Reconstruction. When that spit and bailing wire coalition crumbled, it took every hope of representative, race-blind politics with it.
Statistically, voting participation has increased by roughly 50,000 persons over each of the last three elections. Voter turnout for 2001 was roughly 560,000, in 2002 it rose to around 608,000.
The 2007 elections pulled 653,000 voters, so it's hard to even attribute the rise in voter turnout to the CoP, which began a useful trend of appealing to young voters with a strong Internet presence.
Mr Manning trumped that by dumping a decisive number of PNM stalwarts and replacing them with much younger (and more politically naive) faces. Mr Panday's party hired Orange Sky, producing a wonderfully cynical video that ran in the two days leading up to the election that positioned Mr Rojas as a Pied Piper leading the orange-clad young out of PNM degradation into halcyon fields of green.
I'm a big believer in the vote and in the electoral process as I wrote here and here for the Guardian's editorial space.
I don't actually think that the party we elect into power has as much of an effect on the way this country proceeds as their political leaders would have us think. Trinidad and Tobago is firmly entrenched in the global economy and there are certain processes and procedures that must be followed for us to remain in the catbird seat as a supplier of oil and gas. It's in the details, the little nuances that create quality of life that were comprehensively ignored for most of the October campaign that we find crucial points of leverage.
Troubling clouds gather
The PNM's outrageous contempt for agriculture, for instance, has much greater repercussions than simply the closure of Caroni and the near collapse of local farming efforts. It diverts valuable engineering and inventive resources away from food production, which should be at the core of any thinking society with arable land, to the more effective stripping of a finite natural resource from the earth we happen to be situated on top of.
Yes, we should make the most of high oil and gas prices while they last and create industries that, should they actually be well managed, can continue to leverage our natural resources if prices drop or our capacity to export should become diminished through accelerated exploitation.
Having two Universities which have essentially thrown their doors open to all comers is also a good thing, but all these bright, allegedly educated people emerging from newly egalitarian halls of academia should be tasked with solving the nation's problems, which expand in scope and complexity as we radiate outward from the oilbelt and the safety of offshore installations.
What is the solution for the nightly terrors of Laventille, which is as far from the wellhead as it gets?
We're in a curious space right now, one that's a bit unsettling for anyone who hasn't drunk a willing and heady draft of the PNM's tasty beverage.
Mr Manning has pretty much literally set the stage for his next five years, dragging the President out of the dilapidation of President's House to swear him (and only him) in at Woodford Square, a break from tradition that cost a fortune, brought no relief to the growing rot at the primary residence of the titular President and reinforced the new PM as a "people's leader" regardless of the consequences for the Treasury, tradition or taste.
This week, his new, neophyte team is in coaching sessions to learn the PNM way of government and those new Ministers have a remarkable opportunity to do things differently, though I have no hope at all than any such thing is likely to happen.
More than 20 percent of the electorate chose the CoP as their party of choice and now have no representation at all. Mr Panday has resolutely denigrated these voters as all but traitors and Mr Manning's plans for this large swath of the voting public remain unclear.
Mr Manning has demonstrated that he is willing to make changes to his administration in the face of a mounting electoral threat, but his capacity for confidence is evidently unquenchable. At every point when he could have said to have peaked in his assessment of himself, he has merely notched a piton and scaled to another level.
What's next for the PNM faithless?
The responsibility for the next five years of PNM rule do not lie with the Opposition UNC or the shattered CoP, this is our challenge. The UNC under Mr Panday is a wounded, feral beast which snarls terribly and chews cannibalistically at its own wounds, but is demonstrably incapable of unseating the PNM (despite Mr Panday's claims of vote-splitting, the statistics do not overwhelmingly support this argument) and has been reluctant to form a working alternate government.
Staggering under the weight of the money spent on balloons and other election related debts, the CoP will have to scale back far to become the grassroots movement is began as. Better to declare bankruptcy, fold those tents and banners and let the young people regroup under new leadership, perhaps with Mr Dookeran as an elder wiseman, consulting on the process.
What I'd really like to see, is an abandonment of the futile party stoking activities in favour of work that might actually fill the gaps that exist in civil society.
I'd like to see watchdog groups spring up on the Internet that report on the activities of each Minister and Ministry (and Shadow Minister, if the UNC ever gets around to being an Opposition again), what's happening in Parliament and in the Senate (now available, for the most part, on television for the convenience of armchair observers), what's happening with public projects that consume vast sums of public money, analysis of impenetrable reports, legalese, data sets and other public information that's deliberately written and prepared in such a way as to defy casual comment or analysis.
Yes, this should be the job of the media, but I'm not going to go there, because I'm actively involved in this communications forum and any energy I expend of lamenting its failings would be far better spent on improving its capacity.
Much of this watchdog work can be initiated for far less than the cost of the soft drinks that catered any single political rally on any night during the elections, but it calls for a commitment on the part of intelligent people to force transparency and public understanding on a process that's designed to defy casual observation.
There are people doing some of this now. Raymond Ramcharitar's unrestrained sarcasm and general nihilism is available on his blog, a savvy commentator is watching a lot of local television and a scattering of newspapers on another blog, but there is more that can and should be done.
There is room for rumour/scandal sites that gather information that's been surreptitiously obtained, but a ground up, Internet based movement like this would be far more impressive if it sported signed work.
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