KJ needs to debate, Anwar hard put to decline

COMMENT Beware they say when you are granted your wishes. For what you may have wished for might not be what you really wanted.

That may well turn out to be Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim's discovery in the wake of his issuing a challenge to Prime Minister Najib Razak to a public debate on the economy.

Two and a half years ago, Anwar issued a similar challenge to debate an Umno topnotch leader on fuel prices.

The issue was then an inflamed one. World prices of crude had been on an upward spiral all year and the government, stung by electoral reverses in March 2008, was trying to mollify a roused public by cutting prices after having raised them.

Anwar had claimed the increases should not have taken place in the first instance and that the subsequent cuts were not deep enough.

The public clamour over the issue had reached a pitch of intensity that though no Umno top gun was willing to take up the challenge to debate, Anwar found he was unable to stand down when the relatively low-ranking information minister, Ahmad Shabery Cheek, stepped forward to accept the gage.

Anwar condescended to accept the challenge. And there resulted a debate between a supple Anwar and a taut Shabery Cheek.

Public debates between politicians are notoriously hard to score. But, generally speaking, it was felt that Anwar wiped the floor with Shabery in that encounter.

The momentum of public opinion has more to do with whether challenges of this type are accepted at the level at which they are issued or passed down the line.

Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin appears to understand the dynamics. That is why he has risen to exploit the opportunity Anwar's challenge to Najib has offered him.

And Najib, after deprecating the utility of the debate vis-a-vis the question of what is good economic policy, shrewdly encouraged Khairy's hubristic overreach.

Now Anwar, having stooped to joust with Shabery Cheek, would be hard put to decline upstart Khairy's pretensions.

'It's the economy, stupid'

The state of the national economy is not now as febrile an issue as fuel prices were when Anwar debated Shabery.

But that famous quip - "It's the economy, stupid" - attributed to Bill Clinton's campaign to unseat the elder George Bush in the 1992 US presidential race is taken as broadly reflective of what voters universally fixate on when deciding on who to choose to lead the country.

The decision by Malaysian voters on whom to endorse - Pakatan Rakyat or BN - at the next general election, expected to be held much earlier than its due date in 2013, would not turn on the question of the national economy alone.

There are a host of other issues like mounting corruption, rising crime - not least, the treatment of the police of suspects - and politicised education which will also determine voters' choice.

But the issue of how the economy is faring and how to handle it would still be a central concern because that question impacts on the wallets of ordinary Malaysians, enough that it would matter appreciably in the crunch.

That being likely, Khairy's rising to accept Anwar's challenge to Najib to debate on the economy is a shrewd read of the dynamics.

Also, for Khairy's career, the move would help retrieve lost luster.

It would give him the cachet he has lacked when Najib omitted to name him to the cabinet, pointedly snubbing him in favour of his rival Mukhriz Mahathir and Umno Youth deputy chief Razali Ibrahim, both of whom were given deputy ministers' posts.

Anwar is justified to decline to debate Khairy on account of the latter's want of status equivalence. But having once disregarded this comparative measure in debating Shabery, he would strain to resuscitate it in this case.

 

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal profession for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.