COMMENT “It's the economy, stupid,” was the one-liner that acquired cocktail party immortality at the successful end of Bill Clinton's campaign to unseat George Bush senior in the 1992 US presidential contest.

 

Bush could not leverage on the quick US victory in Operation Desert Storm the previous year to head off the challenge of the Arkansas Governor whose savvy concentration on the then struggling economy reduced the Republican incumbent to a the status of one-term occupant of the White House.

 

Since the 1992 presidential contest, the state of the national economy has acquired inordinate importance as an issue in election campaigns in the world's democracies.

 

Save for the 2004 polls in India when the Bharatiya Janata Party was defeated by a coalition led by Congress, elections in the established democracies have gone the way of parties that commanded suasion over voters by reason of their better plans for a stalling economy's rejuvenation.

 

The striking exception to this pattern was the BJP defeat in the 2004 Indian election.

 

Their unprecedented record of 10 percent annual growth to the economy powering a slogan of “Indian Shining” could not prevent their defeat to Congress simply because the gains from growth were seen by the majority rural voters as favouring urban dwellers and not the villages where the country's teeming millions lived.

 

The BJP's defeat is about the only exception to what must now be known as the democracies' 'Bill Clinton Rule', to wit, that it's a patently losing hand one gets to play if given poor economic cards to dice with, in a general election.

 

Though Malaysia is at least 33 months from GE14, a long enough span for things to turn around from the sputtering economic situation that is the country's present lot to something appreciably better, observers have already written off Umno-BN head honcho Najib Abdul Razak's ( photo ) chances of leading his pack to victory at the poll.

 

And that's because of the Bill Clinton Rule: “It's the economy, stupid.”  

 

'Haemorrhaging of trust'

It's time to level that our present economic straits are dire and the cause of it is primarily the haemorrhaging of trust from the government as a result of the shenanigans surrounding the debt-ridden 1MDB.

 

Whatever the extenuations offered by defenders of the Najib Razak administration over the sovereign wealth fund, the economic indices of a falling ringgit, huge national debt, capital flight, the painful exactions on the populace of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), and overall slumping business sentiment suggest that the government is in grave difficulty.

 

This is not primarily the result of any complicated psychological or ideological failings: it is the consequence of the cumulative operation of the simple factors that normally bring down governments.

 

Essentially, it is economic failure beyond the limits of plausible excuse or explanation; lack of new ideas and panic about the lack of new ideas; and the inevitable boredom, on the part of the public, with tired, old ideas and their discredited exponents.

 

The process of deterioration is pretty remorseless once it sets in and defies cosmetic repairs such as cabinet reshuffles. The question is how long it will take before it reaches the critical stage.

 

Some would say the stage has been reached now that the ringgit has gone beyond four to the US dollar.

 

The fact that the RM4 barrier has been broken is like the two-thirds parliamentary dominance that Umno-BN long enjoyed.

 

Broken at the 2008 general election, its encore at the Election 2013 meant that a barrier that had exerted all the mystification that the Gordian knot must once have before Alexander the Great severed it, has been consigned to oblivion.

 

How apposite, then, that a politician once relegated to oblivion has resurged in the prime ministerial stakes as the one equipped by experience and by personal stature to lead the effort to rollback the decay that has eaten into not only the economic sinews of the country, but practically every other aspect of national life.

 

Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah has long inhabited a grey zone in Malaysian politics, seemingly isolated and marooned on the banks of the river of national events rather than swimming in its currents.

 

His situation has been a sort of wilderness except for the thought that for some politicians the wilderness has been one of the most romantic stretches ever since Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle went there and returned with the most triumphant results.

 

Nonpartisan stature

With Malaysia's economy in a parlous state, with the Najib administration looking like a severely overdrawn bank account, with other sectors of institutional life looking just as anaemic, with the opposition in disarray, oscillations in the political pendulum have contrived to throw up the MP of Gua Musang as the leader with the economic savvy and nonpartisan stature to draw allround support to steer the ship of state into calmer waters.

 

The present political gridlock of a deeply compromised PM battling incipient internal revolt and external calls to walk the plank, and an opposition riven by ideological cleavages, the propulsion towards a government of national unity is inevitable with Razaleigh at the fore as the most suitable candidate to steer the coalition.

 

It appears he is being asked whether he is being considered for the hypothetical role of national helmsman by a media prone to seeing issues in personal than in substantive hues.

 

His answers are hedged with ambiguity, in keeping with the indirection that is the mode of Malay political discourse.

 

Most certainly, one of his first tasks, should he be placed at the helm, is to opt for a mode of discourse that is more direct, more forthright.

This is because greater than the economic anaemia the country is presently saddled with is the confusion that befuddles everything – whether we are secular or Islamic, democratic capitalist or crony capitalist, whether government should be in business or it's not government's business to be in business, not to mention whether a bank account of a public entity may be subsumed under a personal account.

 

This confusion is stifling and should be ended forthwith. 

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.