Getting ahead of oneself

Election fever has hit Singapore. Going by the groundswell of sentiment on the Singaporean blogosphere, you may be led to think that popular anger at the PAP government is going to lose them quite a few constituencies this time around. Yet going by the results of the last election, it seems this anger is peculiar to the small segment of the Singaporean population that makes up the blogosphere. Many other blogs or sites have touched on this issue so I won’t repeat it. Instead, I have been thinking about the PAP’s latest petulant complaint, that opposition candidates are received with open arms and much less scrutiny than the PAP ones. Well guess what? This is a phenomenon that results directly from PAP politics!

In the past, opposition candidates were either weakened through lawsuits to the point of bankruptcy (JBJ and CSJ) or exiled to foreign nations (Francis Seow etc). Those that were deemed safe enough to coexist with the PAP government were constantly subject to character assassinations and smear campaigns. They were ridiculed for bad grades (CST) or some other personal failing. We were led to believe that PAP candidates were the best because of their combination of good grades in school, top educational pedigree and successful careers. Opposition members were painted over as mediocre students, slipper-wearing crackpots, extreme radicals or mentally-disturbed sociopaths.

If we believed this hook line and sinker, then it’s no surprise that with the unveiling of the latest opposition candidates, the public would embrace them so warmly. Whether or not good grades and educational pedigree make for good leaders, the opposition can boast of having the same if not better caliber candidates as the PAP. With years of making us believe that these were the qualities that made for a good MP, the PAP’s strategy is now inadvertently legitimizing the candidacy of the opposition. Furthermore, years of ‘fixing’ the opposition has resulted in a climate of fear, so that any opposition candidates who emerge that do not appear clinically insane, are instantly perceived as brave, courageous and patriotic. Can the PAP’s policies back-fire any worse than this?

In a sense, the environment that the PAP has created selects for a certain breed of opposition candidates. While I do not know any one of the opposition candidates personally, here is my guess of what his or her typical profile is, based on age group. For those in their thirties and forties, he (or she) is likely to be working in a private company or have started his own company. He is very idealistic and possibly driven by religious motivations, and sincerely believes that with more alternative voices in parliament change can come about. For those older, he is likely to have been very successful in his career and felt that it is time to serve the public. He is driven more by frustration at recent policies and a sense of nostalgia for a Singapore of the past.

Conversely, the PAP’s history of trooping out one Oxbridge graduate after another sets up a self-reinforcing system, so that future candidates not from the same mould are scrutinized to a greater degree. The initial curiosity into Tin Pei Ling’s personal life is probably driven by the desire to know the qualities that got her selected over other qualified candidates. When the public balked at her lack of stellar achievements, she did not help matters by flubbing her debutante media appearance. Her Palinesque lack of substance did not fit the mould of the typical PAP candidate, drawing her even more flak. Once the PAP set the standard for high-achieving candidates, they cannot blame the public for spurning their latest insipid offering, for the public is just holding them to the high lofty standards they have painstakingly created in our minds.