I give up. Learnasia has a learning impediment

By Rajpal Abeynayake

(December 30, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Perhaps it is too late now for the UNP to turn the clock back on flawed strategy that has animated its early campaign for the 2010 presidential election. But the UNP is not a learner party, even though led ideologically these days by Learnasia statisticians and lead economists. These Learnasia prototypes have a remarkable ability to be so full of themselves, that they cannot see beyond their squat spectacle-perch noses.

The early 2010 campaign of the UNP showed signs that the party had one strategy in the main for the election, which was to chase-up and secure the Tamil vote with whatever strategy that could be improvised.

Nothing inherently wrong with that modus operandi, unless of course it is done in typical UNP fashion — full of hubris and bombast, but backfiring at the rear-end with a thunderously deafening report.

What the Learnasia types did not learn was that linear thinking does not apply in matters of electoral dynamics.

The UNP’s monumental failing in this election has been so basic that it can be summed up in one paragraph:

The UNP Learnasia bureau has assumed that the same dynamic that obtained four years ago applies at this presidential election: ie: that the votes for the UNP+JVP and the UPFA would fall into the two respective columns almost equally, making the Tamil vote the deciding factor on 26th January 2010.

This assumes that Mahinda Rajapaksa who was a virtual political nobody at the last election despite having been the prime minister for a short while, has not grown in stature after four years of incumbency in which Prabhakaran’s terrorists were trounced. But, Mahinda Rajapaksa in his post-war incarnation is bound to gain votes and add to his column at this 2010 outing.

Several SLFPers who didn’t vote for him in 2005 will have no hesitation voting for him this time, Mahinda now being the dominant force in the SLFP, whereas he was not even the leader of the party at the last outing. Several neutral swing voters who thought Rajapaksa was a political tyro four years ago, are bound to vote with him this time as they may feel that despite his monumental failings in good governance, he has a good report card, and presidential stature, having finished a 30 year old war that previous presidents only struggled with.

With Mahinda’s column expanding, the UNP should have to be in active contest for Sinhala votes, and even Sinhala hard-line votes, which the UNP appears to take for granted because a war hero is running. Instead, in wooing Tamil votes at the cost of all else, the UNP seems to have alienated - - perhaps irreparably now — the core Sinhala majority electorate.

Now, to further extrapolate on this basic postulate —— Educated lunatics

that all UNP strategists are myopic, be they lead economists or bottom rung losers (...interchangeable really..) is obvious from the fact that they never did a reasonable post-mortem of the last presidential elections in late 2005.

You wouldn’t miss an elephant in a narrow alleyway if it stands ten feet in front of you - - but the UNP elephants would. They are on wishful denial about the fact that the UNP performed abysmally under Ranil Wickremesinghe’s leadership in 2005. They have assumed as they are wont to, under the ideological weight of pro-Tamil Diaspora and pro- NGO thinking, that what really robbed them of the election last time around was Prabhakaran’s ban on Vanni voter participation in December 2005.

The UNP’s educated lunatics and rich and lazy lounge lizards have therefore conveniently forgotten the fact that their candidate lost the “South’’ so baldy that he lost every single electorate of the majority Sinhala areas except Colombo town Galle town and Kandy town, in 2005.

If this was a parliamentary election under the first past the post system, the result would have been a washout for Ranil Wickremesinghe’s UNP, which would have been reduced to smattering of seats, almost exclusively from the North and the East.

What really lost the election for the UNP last time around was its candidate’s wretched performance in the majority Sinhala heartland, where he was able to win only in three major towns, losing every single electorate in the rest of the map, thus making his victory dependent on the Tamil votes which never came.

Now, this was in a match up with a candidate who barely had the support of his own party, and who was, in this particular outing, struggling for funds compared to the cash flushed UNP. Moreover, this was a candidate who was a relative political tyro, being essentially an unknown quantity having never been closely identified with the previous governing elite Kumaratunge cabal, let alone having had a shot at actually governing, in contrast to Wickremesinghe who virtually ran the country for a short interregnum, because when he was elected prime minister, the then president’s party had lost the election and therefore its legitimacy to govern.

Considering that past history, the UNP’s priority in this election would have been plain to a five year old —- court the core Sinhala vote, consolidate on candidate Fonseka’s war-hero image, so that a strengthened Mahinda Rajapaksa who had expanded his vote base in all of the Sinhala electorates that he won last time, could be defeated in at least 80 per cent of the core Sinhala constituencies.

Not strange, that this recent past needs to be emphasized so strenuously to morons of the calibre you now get in the UNP, in kissing-comfort with the Sunday Leader dunces.
To whom else would you have to take pains to explain that it’s clever to prioritize on winning among the majority Sinhalese, even at the risk of losing among the minority Tamils?

The math would have been basic to a kindergartner, but the Learnasia within the UNP cannot learn it, even if they are punched in the face with the reality. Forgetting all of these fundamental electoral dynamics, from the get-go the UNP assumed a linear pattern for this election, which is that the block votes for Mahinda and Fonseka being taken for granted in the Sinhala majority areas, the Tamil votes would narrowly decide the outcome.

Hence, the heavy pandering to Tamil interests from the outset, it can be reasonably assumed, from a UNP coached Fonseka....

He said he would go beyond the 13th amendment. He said he would initiate war crimes inquiries. Finally, he is said to have said, via a journalist’s quote or otherwise, that Gotabaya ordered the killings of LTTE surrendees, the inference being that he was fair in contrast to Mahinda and his men to the LTTE, which, it has been assumed, most Tamils silently support.

The UNP’s mad dash for Tamil votes is perhaps spurred on by the anxiety that Mahinda Rajapaksa stands to win in large swathes of the north and the east due to concentrated development efforts, post-war, in these areas, though he is by no means guaranteed the northern and eastern vote, as was testimony from the local election outcome recently in the north.

The silver lining for the UNP in all of this is that the JVP vote would add to its candidate’s column this time around in the Sinhala south.

The late Anura Bandaranaike once said that the SLFP cannot win without the JVP, adding that the math had proved this beyond doubt. Well, J.R. Jayewardene once thought that the UNP is invincible under his PR. Bill Gates once said that 2 GB would be “more than enough memory for any home computer user ha ha’’, so thank you.

The size of the post war Rajapaksa boost, cannot be underestimated. His image has swelled almost fiendishly as an impish deliverer of goods, who did something in contrast to other presidents — win the war, while keeping anti national forces in the international community at bay. They also see that he did all of this wearing the national costume, speaking

Family bandism

Sinhalese at the UN and international forums, and gamely beating the Ruhuna drum.
Though corruption has grown and family bandism is endemic, and the constitution is in the dustbin, his growing stature has counter-balanced the negatives eerily, and kept him quite competitive to say the least.

The UNP, even with the JVP, cannot take the majority Sinhala south for granted.

If the UNP backed Fonseka loses all the Sinhala electorates in the country expect the three key Green towns at this outing, he’d have enough time on his hands after January to curse the UNP’s linear thinkers who undermined his most valuable asset, the image of the war-hero —- in a mad rush to court the not so pivotal Tamil vote.

Now, if the UNP can turn the page, and woo the Sinhala vote by not going out on a limb as they have done so far for the Tamil vote, and then win this election by winning the Sinhala majority base, I will take the credit for giving them the key to their victory in this column written on this pivotal week, barely three Sundays before the balloting on 26th January 2010. Amen!