Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi ends his first year in office weaker than he began. What he set out to do, to chart his own course and shake off suggestions that he is but his predecessor, Dr Mahathir Mohamad's ventriloquist dummy, he has yet to begin as he juggles a political career between the needs of his place in history and the pressures of a resilient political opposition within his own ranks.

No one but his own advisers believed it would be easy. But the political spin of his administration, all of which is taken as the gospel, by Malaysia's uncritical and sycophantic mainstream media and what passes for its intelligentsia, and the middle class, begins with each passing day to be cloaked in fantasy. Far from the ventriloquist dummy, he is fast becoming a creature of his own insouciance and ever so firmly trapped within the political forces this unleashed.

He began with much promise, his populist prescriptions what Malaysians wanted to hear after two decades of Dr Mahathir's autocratic administration out of touch within a deeply divided society. The Mahathir epoch ensured, in retrospect, a centrifugal force that deeply scarred Malaysian society and which, if unrepaired, creates racial and social communities that does not even pretend to be part of the larger Malaysia. This in turn assumes an irreparable divide between the governors and the governed.

What I say is not new or extreme: this used to be once the subject of polite discourse in diplomatic and upper middle class dinner parties and receptions; now it is the norm in the coffee shops, and whenever half a dozen people meet for a meal or to pass the time.