A new promise every day

published in the Jamaica Gleaner: Wednesday | August 1, 2007

Dawn Ritch, Columnist

The darling of media, Bruce Golding, Opposition Leader, has been making promises left, right and centre. He's even made promises to illegal taxi men.

The press sits back and looks adoringly into his eyes and writes down everything he says. But they rarely bother to investigate the sensibility or logicality of any of it. They just regurgitate it without question.

He was shot at on the campaign trail, but he is seen on television standing calmly behind the campaign vehicle at the time. He is making education free, but parents must still pay. He is givingus fixed election dates in his first 100 days, but a noted constitutional expert says it can't be done.

Some sections of the press are calling for the manifestos of the parties, one of which has just been published. But Golding has already made at least 16 promises publicly, and nobody's bothered to add the cost of that, or examine them in anyway. Nobody, save Dennis Morrison, who writes for another newspaper.

So what's the point of a printed manifesto? Long ago, Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) General Secretary Karl Samuda warned publicly that theirs has over 300 ideas. If the press can't be bothered to examine 16 previous ones thoroughly, why would anybody think we would be interested in looking at 300?

Immaterial policies

Manifestos are cynical and worthless documents. Policies are immaterial when you have somebody crazed like Omar Davies, P.J. Patterson or Bruce Golding at the wheel. They do what they please, when they please and where they please. Then all policies, legislation and financial constraints fly out the window, along with the manifesto.

Already, some of the things Golding has announced are at variance with the considered position and policies of the JLP itself. Among them are fixed election dates, republican status and constitutional reform. Did anyone ask the central executive or governing body of the JLP to vote on what he's announcing, and reverse themselves? If so, I can't understand why it didn't make headlines.

These are the things that Golding believed in when he founded the National Democratic Movement. But when did they become official policy for the JLP? Sorting out that manifesto must have been a painful task indeed. Good thing it doesn't matter anyway, because nobody can pin the tail on that donkey.

It is not surprising to me that Golding should now make a new promise to the electorate every day. Political indecisiveness and endless promises are two sides of the same coin. Yet everything he says is taken at face value by the press, while remarks from Mrs. Simpson Miller are subjected to the greatest scrutiny.

Why is Golding given such a free ride? Despite mounting evidence that much of what he says makes no sense at all, his subsequent clarifications are dutifully reported by the press without a hint of irony. These clarifications are themselves left unexamined.

Accusation of public conspiracy

Since it keeps reporting all the promises he dreams up overnight as public policy, the press opens itself to the accusation of fostering a public conspiracy against him. Certainly, they seem determined to kill his political chances by overexposure. Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising, and this is so particularly in politics.

Bruce Golding has become a flagrantly promiscuous promisor. By the time he has his mass rally in Half-Way Tree, he will have carpeted the country end to end like confetti.

This desperate panic suggests that he'd prepared himself for a five-furlong race. Since it's become a 12-furlong race, he's falling behind, and hopes to close the distance by shouting. This is both pitiful and pathetic.

Nevertheless, media is virtually unanimous that the JLP advertisement 'Nah Change No Course' is an effective and devastating attack upon the People's National Party (PNP). But, the slogan has become a rallying cry for the PNP base all over the island.

If that was their intention, then the JLP ad has been a huge success. But, the objective of political advertising is not usually to encourage the supporters of one's opponent. The effort should destabilise them, not give them a battle cry.

All of this suggests to me that the press in general understands neither politics nor advertising. They are likely to take the position that if Mrs. Simpson Miller made more promises, she'd get better press coverage.