COMMENT | It appears the main challenge to speakers on the Pakatan Harapan campaign circuit for the next general election (GE14) is how to keep a crowd in thrall when the main draw is absent.

In culinary terms, it's how to make the hors d'oeuvres as tasty as the main dish.

By that measure, the speakers at the Amanah-organised Harapan ceramah in Padang Pinji Mewah, on the outskirts of Ipoh last night, were a success because there wasn't a palpable sense of disappointment when the emcee announced that Dr Mahathir Mohamad would not be making an appearance.

Urgent matters in Kelantan had apparently sidetracked the Bersatu chair but the 500-odd crowd – some 300 seated under four tents in a part of an open field, and another 200 milling on the fringes in drizzly weather – that had gathered by the session's start weren't stirring from their vantage points.

Instead the assembly, composed mainly of Malays from the surrounding areas mixed with a modicum of Chinese and a slew of Indians, seemed to wax as the ceramah lengthened into the night, wanting perhaps to stay to hear what Amanah president Mohamad Sabu, the next luminary in the supporting cast of speakers, was going to say.

The Amanah chief and Harapan deputy president didn't disappoint.

This despite Sabu, a 40-year veteran of the campaign circuit with all but two of those years spent on the PAS stage, is no longer the fiery speaker of his days with the Islamist party when he used to enthrall with an oratorical style punctuated by the colourful vocabulary of the practised debater, flavoured with the rhetorical tics of the streetside medicine seller.

Sabu's now a mellow, weather-beaten exponent of a strain of campaign oratory that suggests the fire of youth has given way to the modest, slightly weary, pleadings of middle age.

Missing are the howls of disgust and cackles of derision that had peppered his rhetoric on the hustings in reformasi's early days.

In its place is found these days the wizened manner of an avuncular elder tugging gently on the sleeve of his listeners, quietly confident his persuasions, culled from long years of seasoned observations of the ebb and flow of national politics, would finally be heeded.

Intriguing accounts

Part of the attraction of his spiel last night was his rendition of his interactive experiences with Mahathir in Harapan's presidential leadership council meetings.

Intriguing accounts of their interactive pairings have wafted through the grapevine, depicting Sabu as hypnotised by Mahathir's personal charisma.

There was a time when Sabu used to lambaste Mahathir the authoritarian. Last night Sabu's disclosure of the former premier's apparent transfiguration as a democrat sounded not like the old man.

“He listens to all the views expressed in four-hour long meetings, takes them into consideration before arriving at a decision,” said Sabu.

He made it sound that the stamina of the 92-year-old Mahathir was a thing of amazement on the part of elder stateman's much younger interlocutors in Harapan. 

“He (Mahathir) knows he is not listening to members of the BN supreme council when sitting with us in the Harapan council,” said Sabu.

“It's not like when there was Samy Vellu to say 'Saya sokong' even before Mahathir has completed what he has said,” observed Sabu, to guffaws from the crowd as it warms to the recollections of the Amanah leader, whom Mahathir had detained under the Internal Security Act.

Sabu went on: “In March I had to chair the Harapan presidential council meeting because Azizah (PKR president) was not available and Mahathir was sitting on my right. I told him how things have turned out that you are sitting on my right to which he remarked he found it amusing that I was sitting on his left.”

Butt of jokes

Yes, Sabu intimated that politics makes strange bedfellows but the Amanah supremo said the dire current state of national affairs made opposition politicians forget the wrongdoings inflicted by Mahathir in the past to unite with former adversaries to save the country from the depredations of the Najib Razak regime.

“You go to the border these days and the Thais don't want our ringgit,” said Sabu, mouthing the Thai word ‘mai aow’ for 'don't want'.

“We have become a nation scorned, the butt of jokes by our neighbours,” he chortled. 

Sabu appealed to the Malays not to be taken in by the Umno propaganda that the DAP-controlled Harapan and loss of power by Umno-BN would be tantamount to Malay loss of power.

“When the ringgit loses its value, you would have lost more than anything else that could matter,” said Sabu.

The absence of Mahathir was not felt after the crowd had heard earlier speakers DAP's Ngeh Hoo Kam and S Sivakumar, PKR's Dr Lee Boon Chye, and Amanah's Nizar Jamaluddin and Mujahid Yusof Rawa.

Each took on luscious bits of Umno-BN misdeeds and wrung laughs from the crowd from satirical flourishes, with Nizar's skewing of a Mandarin ditty mixed with Bahasa lashings, raising the possibility that a comic amalgam of Bahasa, Mandarin, English and Tamil is a rhetorical work in progress. Under the auspices of Harapan governance, no doubt.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.