The nonsense about "winnable candidate"

By Raymond Tombung

Tun Musa Hitam had just shown his amusement and low opinion about this new popular terminology called “winnable candidates.” He said that it is not up to the leaders to decide but up to the people! And how true!

Personally, I have wondered how to determine if a candidate is “winnable” or not. Anyway, I am also not comfortable with the word “winnable” in this context because “winnable” actually means “can be won”. But what they mean is “able to win” (boleh menang) a phrase which has no single word to express in the English language. So we are stuck with the awkward “winnable”.

So how do know if someone is a “can win” candidate? What are the criteria to being a “can win” candidate? How about a list of traits and capabilities twice the length of your arm, my friend! No one single set of qualities guarantees election victory. The guy can be a John F. Kennedy, but if he belongs to a party hated by the people he is doomed.

And conversely, he can be a cave man or a buffalo but if his party is popular like PBS in 1985, he can still be a giant killer like Datuk Kadoh Agundong ! So there is actually no such thing as a winnable candidate because anyone can be winnable or “loseable” under the right or wrong circumstances! Leaders make events but events also make leaders.

To prove this, there is now a good email joke being forwarded around. It goes like this: It is time to choose a new leader and only your vote counts. Here are the facts about the three candidates on the ballot paper: The first candidate associates with crooked politicians, had two mistresses, chain smokes and have eight to ten martinis per day. The second candidate was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon, used opium in college and drinks a quart of whiskey every evening. The third candidate is a decorated war hero, a vegetarian, doesn’t smoke, drinks an occasional beer and never committed adultery. Who would you vote for? Well, my friend, the first candidate was Franklin D. Roosevelt, the second was Winston Churchill and the third was Hitler!

The other headache for the Prime Minister is that new fresh faces being declared winnable candidates would most likely cause retaliations from incumbents who may ensure the winnable candidates don’t win by sabotaging them, and incumbents normally have good stacks of money to do that.

So Tun Musa Hitam is only partly right. It is not just the people who decides if a candidate is winnable but also the rivals in the party, or the strength of cashflows.