COMMENT The ‘bully pulpit’ is the metaphor denoting the stage afforded national leaders who by dint of their prime position to enjoy the right to lecture the country.

Presidents and prime ministers elected by democratic majorities appropriate that stage for the task of getting a country from where it is to where they want it to be.

Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad used the ‘bully pulpit’ every chance he got in his 22 years and three months as head honcho of Malaysia.

He was often proactive, initiating things and getting people to look anew at things that no longer worked and try out ideas that he commended to them.

His ‘Look East’ policy, the initiative that urged Malaysians to regard Japan as an economic model for emulation, is an example of Mahathir’s penchant for coming up with something new and stimulating every now and then.

This was a vital part of his political craft and a demonstration of one of the principles of Machiavellian statecraft: the 16th century Florentine political theorist advised leaders to always introduce a certain amount of ‘force’ - akin to a current of electricity - into the body politic.

That way the populace would sit up and notice what the prime leader is doing.

Machiavelli advised leaders they should not overdo things but they ought not to underdo either.

The political strategist cautioned against overstraining the fabric of a polity. He said a leader must do enough to beguile the people into heading where he wants them to go.

Assuming of course that, by now, observers of the Malaysian political scene concede that Mahathir is actually a diligent student of Machiavellian political strategy, they could also know that an important plank of that modus operandi is that a leader has a responsibility to ensure that the methods he has employed bring success and that when it doesn’t, he has to revamp his strategy to attain the success that may have eluded him.

This is an aspect of the political philosopher’s thinking that has been forgotten simply from the bum rap that, historically, that had come to bvertake his recommended strategy - Machiavelli attempted to advise a leader who had the task of uniting squabbling principalities in 16th century Florence (a domain in what is now Italy).

The bad vibes are undeserved when you consider that through the application of Machiavellian strategy, Otto von Bismarck united Prussian principalities in the late 19th century into becoming what is now modern Germany.

Also, in more recent times, a Machiavellian Francois Mitterrand of France united the squabbling left wing forces of his country under a fairly successful 14-year presidential run that would not have been possible for the French socialists without his cunning.

A prism to understand Dr M’s gyrations

This is not an argument for the adoption of Machiavellian politics; rather it it is a prism by which to understand the gyrations of Mahathir Mohamad who in the tenth decade of his life is striving to pull off another of his iconoclastic endavors.

This goal is to upend Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak on grounds of gross malfeasance, but the odds are stacked against the former PM succeeding.

Mahathir’s attendance at last weekend’s Bersih 4 rally that was aimed at a host of objectives including ejecting Najib from office, was confirmation of the seriousness of the former PM’s purpose and the flexibility of his methods, which at one time held street demonstrations to be the work of layabouts and good-for-nothings.

His attendance took centre stage and though the organisers of the protest, polls reform advocacy group Bersih is not complaining at their supercession, Najib is.

Today, he took the opportunity at a public function to twit the ex-premier at the latter's hogging the ‘bully pulpit’.

Najib, in the six years of his premiership, has singularly failed to use the platform to ramp up public support for his initiatives and projects.

He has preferred to lead from the rear and now is seen as flustered at the way Mahathir is monopolising centre stage in Malayian politics.

Few will sympathise with Najib’s grouse because he failed to assume the bully pulpit when it became available to him in April 2009.

Political fortune favours the bold and the pacemakers, not the timid and the laggards.

Najib’s appeal, in jest no doubt, to Mahathir to get off centre stage in Malaysian politics will be seen as an unfurling of the white flag, though the PM and his cohort are adamant about not yielding any ground.

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.

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