I refer to the Malaysiakini report Car 'n cows: S'gor MB could be charged .

The public does not view the ridiculous cases of cows and a car brought by MACC against the Selangor chief minister as corruption.

Buying beef for the poor is seen as a good deed and using state funds to maintain a personal car used for official purposes is a trivial administrative matter.

If the attorney-general goes ahead and charges Khalid Ibrahim, it will be viewed as political prosecution especially when there are heaps of serious cases of real corruption and abuse of power reported against Umno politicians which never see the light of day.

Public opinion is firmly against charging Khalid but BN has been known to bulldoze away public opinion. Other examples are the Perak power grab and Anwar Ibrahim’s sodomy charge.

Why does a government which has to stand for elections every five years take such a cavalier attitude to public opinion? Doesn’t it have any sense of survival?

To understand this, we must remember that BN has for the past 50 years enjoyed a one-party system where only one party has any chance of winning the elections. As a bonus, support for the opposition was badly fragmented along racial and religious lines.

Hence, BN could stuff whatever it wanted down the throats of the public and get away with it. Losing the elections was never a real possibility.

This changed after the March 8, 2008 tsunami . A two-party system has sneaked up on the political scene but BN is still in denial. With a two party system, either party has the chance of winning. Each party must compete for the trust and approval of the electorate.

This must be something alien to BN. BN’s problem is compounded by the fact that the government no longer monopolises the dissemination of information. Gone are the days when public opinion can be shaped and molded by the mainstream media.

With the pervasion of the Internet, information can no longer be controlled and it is no longer possible to escape public scrutiny. If losing the public relations war is not bad enough, BN’s relationship with the non-Malays is severely frayed and the dominant Umno has not seen fit to repair this rrelationship.

This has turned mixed seats which were once considered safe seats for BN into practically unwinnable seats.

As the final nail in BN’s coffin, a political awakening in Sabah and Sarawak means that a clean sweep of these two crucial states can no longer be relied on.

So here we have a party mired in its old mode of behaviour because it cannot adapt to the new reality. What do you think will happen? Goodbye BN!