Going beyond the lesser of two evils

AM I happy that Donald Trump has been re-elected president of the United States? No. But did the American voters have a real choice? I would say no too.

To me, they were simply choosing the lesser of two evils, much like what we went through post GE15 in November 2022. The 15th General Election had resulted in a hung Parliament, with both Pakatan Harapan and Perikatan Nasional coalitions failing to get a clear majority. Out of the 222 Dewan Rakyat seats, Pakatan had won 81 seats and Perikatan 73 seats, while Barisan Nasional had 30 seats. Gabungan Parti Sarawak and Gabungan Rakyat Sabah got 22 and six seats respectively.

We knew Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim had to forge political partnerships to form the new government and I remember feeling so desperate to keep PAS out of it that I was all for him to bring in Umno, a party which I thought had become arrogant and corrupt. It was the lesser of two evils.

Where the US presidential elections were concerned, Trump was loathsome to a lot of people, including many non-US citizens, for so many reasons.

His narcissism, his questionable ethics and morals, his criminal convictions, etc. Joe Biden, seeking his second term as president, was never the right candidate to take on Trump. He was too old and we could all see he was already grappling with dementia.

So when it became absolutely clear that he could no longer stay in the race, the Democrats replaced him with vice-president Kamala Harris. She was initially greeted with enthusiasm but she soon showed herself to be an empty vessel and even worse than poor Biden.

We can blame the Democratic Party for Trump’s triumph. The party should have seen the warning signs that Biden was no longer fit to hold the highest office in the land and right from the start allowed its selection process of a presidential candidate through what is known as the primaries to pick a stronger, capable contender to take on Trump.

I find former presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s analysis of Harris’ disastrous defeat quite illuminating. I was very impressed by Yang’s intelligence when he was a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 and his take on the Democrats’ disastrous defeat makes a lot of sense to me, even with my limited understanding of how the complicated US presidential election process works.

As Yang states outright, “The real cause of the Dems’ loss was their refusal to hold a nomination process”.

To him, if Biden had been persuaded to step down and a primary was held in January of this year, it would have given other Democrats room to compete with Harris for the nomination.

He names several potential candidates like Governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro, Governor of California Gavin Newsom, Governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer and Governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear.

If that had happened, “The result would have been a strong nominee chosen by voters in a competitive process”, he writes in his op-ed piece “Why Did Kamala Lose? Blame Joe Biden and the Democratic Party” that was published on newsweek.com.

If Harris, who did so poorly when she ran for the presidential primary in 2019, had still emerged as the eventual winner, then Yang believes she would have been “a different candidate (because she) would have done scores of interviews and been fully prepped and toughened”.

Indeed, despite her advantage as the sitting VP, Harris was awful to watch in her interactions and interviews. She never gave a straight answer to any question and instead left people baffled by her “word salads”, as her critics called her ramblings.

Yang was on-point when he observed, “If your candidate can’t win people over by talking to them or in front of them, it’s a major problem.”

Apart from her word salads, Harris had a strange way of putting on different accents for different crowds that seemed very calculated and insincere. Her reply when asked what she would do differently from Biden, “Nothing comes to mind” probably summed her best.

Her mind is truly blank.

With hindsight and results from the election, political pundits also attribute the defeat to Harris and the Democrats’ failure to address issues that were really important to the voters – jobs and the economy. No amount of Hollywood celebrity endorsements could disguise that.

Instead, it underscored how removed Harris’s glitzy and rich supporters were from the hardships of ordinary folks.

Singapore’s former diplomat and currently Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Prof Kishore Mahbubani also alluded to this failure on a CNA Insight episode. He said that the United States has never been so badly divided and that “the liberal East Coast establishment” – the best educated, the most affluent middle class – had completely lost touch with the working class, especially in the heartland.

Mahbubani also said unfettered immigration that Harris oversaw as VP was a deeply serious fear of ordinary Americans.

The third concern he highlighted that I fully agree with was “identity” related to the “wokeness of the Democratic crowd culture” and its obsession with personal pronouns that completely alienated ordinary people.

The American experience seems like a massive hyper reality show that is unreal and unrelated to us here but there are indeed lessons for our politicians.

Transport Minister Anthony Loke was astute enough to join the dots when he said the Democrats lost because the American public felt their lives and livelihoods had worsened under the Biden administration, as pointed out by Mahbubani.

Others are warning Pakatan not to repeat the Democrats’ fatal mistake of compromising their core values to win over conservative voters because, like the US, Malaysia too, has an urban-rural voter divide.

Just like the Republicans hold sway over the conservative rural areas and the Democrats are strong in the urban, progressive areas, Pakatan has long depended on urban voters on the West Coast states while Perikatan and PAS’ strength lies mainly in the rural Malay voters in the northern and East Coast states.

Since becoming PMX, Anwar has tried to strengthen and stabilise his government by pandering to Umno and wooing Malay support with favourable concessions and populist decisions on Malay and religious issues, while the reforms for a more moderate, inclusive, merit-based Malaysia that Pakatan had promised have been put on the backburner.

Yet, despite the undelivered promises, Pakatan won the recent by-elections in mixed state seats of Kuala Kubu Baru, Selangor, and Mahkota, Johor, showing that non-Malay voters still support it because they fear the alternative.

But such sentiments may not last long if Pakatan continues to focus on wooing Malay-Muslim voters and neglect the concerns and expectations of non-Malays whose patience will definitely run out. The latter may not still vote for Perikatan-PAS but in frustration, they may abstain from voting in future polls.

I may have no faith in Perikatan-PAS but I wish I could because I long for a time when I am torn choosing between two excellent candidates who do not play the race and religious card but are really laser focused on serving the people as competent, moderate, inclusive and completely colour-blind elected representatives.

Just as Americans should have been given a better choice of leaders and not the lesser of two evils, so too should Malaysians.

The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.