Political lessons from real daily life

As I have said earlier in this blog, if I were still a DAP member who is eligible to vote in the sate election in Malacca, I would have cast a vote for Guan Eng. There is no doubt about that at all.

However, I also told a Chinese-language journalist who asked me for comments just now that if I was able to give Guan Eng advice before he made the decision to contest in the state election, I would have adviced against it.

That means, in my opinion, Guan Eng should not have chosen to contest in the state-level party election at all in the first place.

The reason is that, as the secretary-general of the party as well as an opposition leader who is well-known nationally and internationally, Guan Eng has already been well recognised and respected. Who dare to publicly shame a leader who has gone to jails twice if there is no very strongly-felt grievances that serve to break the psychological barrier?

Many DAP leaders and members at the grassroot level, including those in Malacca, would have been very happy to see him performing at the national arena while they themselves continue to serve the people or slug it out with MCA, Gerakan or one another at their level. But once their local games, opinions, works, roles, initiatives, plans, networks or alignments of forces are 'disrupted' or not respected, they would become resentful.

Leaders are often respected only from a distance and as long as the perception of impartiality is not shattered by excessive involvement in localised micro-management.

As I also told the journalist, nobody in the entertainment, crime, sports or any other desks in the press room would like their Group Editor-in-Chief to join them everyday for the daily discussion or planning meetings and to give them exact micro-orders to, say, publish Chow Yun Fatt's, but not Michael Jackson's pictures in Page 4A2 on 24 August, 2005.

As running a newspaper is not like publishing a personal blog, managing a modern supermarket in the 21st century certainly needs different types of managerial skill from my late father's style of operating his own one-man coffeeshop which was registered only as single proprietorship in the 1960s and 1970s.