'Doctor' Rowley's dilemma
By Michael Harris
Monday, May 10th 2010
Last Thursday evening I journeyed to Diego Martin to take in a political meeting. I am glad I did. It was simply the best political meeting I have witnessed or watched (on television) for the entire campaign season.
I refer, of course, to the launch by Dr Keith Rowley of his campaign to retain the constituency of Diego Martin West in the upcoming general elections. The meeting had almost everything: a large and supportive crowd; a platform of speakers who were articulate and dynamic and served up a feast of picong and passion; and something which I thought had disappeared from the firmament of election campaigning in the country - genuine political education.
The only missing ingredient was politics. Don’t get me wrong; there was plenty of a certain kind of politics. Both the candidate and supporting speaker, Fitzgerald Hinds, hurled boulder after boulder at key figures in the opposition coalition, and they did so without resorting to the character assassination, the nasty innuendoes and the racist insinuations which have characterised the platform of the main PNM campaign.
But the truth is that many, if not most, of the hundreds of people in the crowd that night, both PNM and non-PNM, did not go there to hear the politics of the general election. They went to hear what they hoped would be a strategic intervention in the political campaign for the leadership of the PNM and for a new leadership in the country as a whole. And if those people, at the end, left the meeting unsatisfied, in spite of the feast that was served, it was because they did not get what they came to hear.
They did get a taste of it. Former attorney general Bridgid Annisette-George gave an absolutely lucid and cogently constructed disquisition on the place of values and integrity in politics. In so doing she not only reached back to the finest traditions of the early PNM but in fact presented the statement of case, the essence of the indictment against Mr Manning and his leadership of the PNM and of the country.
It was a splendid opening for Dr Rowley but when he danced up to the limbo bar he chose to galay. He began by acknowledging that he knew people in the crowd had come from all over the country to hear what he had to say. But he averred that he could not understand what they expected him to say. He stressed that he was a PNM candidate, speaking on a PNM political platform, in a PNM constituency, in the middle of a general election.
Then he came directly to the heart of the matter. Anyone, he stated, who expected him in those circumstances to attack the political leader of the party had to be crazy. ’When a ship goes into battle,’ he shouted, ’that is no time to throw the captain overboard.’
His argument was a powerful one, powerfully delivered. But it was, for all of that, a colossal bramble. For anyone who has paid attention to Dr Rowley’s political strategy and tactics ever since he was fired from the cabinet by Mr Manning would know that, in his refusal to directly challenge Mr Manning on anything other than the most specific and circumscribed of issues, he has been consistent and it has nothing to do with the fact that the country is in the midst of a general election or that he is a backbencher talking to his government.
There is no question that Dr Rowley’s ambition is to replace Mr Manning as the political leader of the PNM. He has run against him before for the position and he has, particularly since he was fired, positioned himself as the leader of the opposition to Mr Manning in the party. The problem is that Dr Rowley does not want to challenge Mr Manning directly because he fears that any such challenge, particularly given Mr Manning’s vindictive and unscrupulous nature, could irredeemably fracture the party.
And therein lies Dr Rowley’s dilemma. For what Dr Rowley really wants is to inherit the party whole and intact and just as it is now under Mr Manning. He does not see any need for change in the party except in the position of political leader. But if nothing is wrong with the party then why should the party change its leader? There are no arguments which Dr Rowley can advance to support his contention that there is nothing wrong with the party but that he should be the ’Doctor’’ instead of Mr Manning. If the party is well then the ’Doctor’’ is the right one. But if the ’Doctor’’ is the wrong one then the party cannot be well. Dr Rowley cannot have it both ways. So he finds himself in a condition of stasis engendered by an ambition entirely unsupported by a commensurate vision. He is utterly paralysed.
What Dr Rowley does not see and cannot envision is that what is required of him is that he takes the opportunity presented by this general election to provide the leadership for a campaign which seeks to reconstruct the party and to take it to an entirely different level. If the PNM is to prevail it must seek to position itself once again as the national party of the country. There is simply no way to do that other than to pay whatever price is necessary today in order to ensure its ascendancy tomorrow.
Such a campaign platform therefore would spend very little time focusing on this general election except as an example of the depths of iniquity out of which we must rise. Such a campaign would not even have to challenge Mr Manning; it would simply pass him by, leaving him clinging to an empty shell. What such a campaign would do however is to elaborate, like Dr Williams did after 1971, ’New perspectives’ for the party and the society relevant to this time and place and the aspirations of all our people.
Any such new perspective would inevitably have to begin by repudiating lock, stock and barrel the conceptual edifice of maximum leadership, of which Mr Manning is the undoubted apotheosis, and which is what has brought the party and the country to these desperate times.
Unfortunately last Thursday, on a warm evening in Diego Martin, Dr Rowley did none of that. Instead, so entrenched is he in the syndrome of maximum leadership, that he found himself in the utterly absurd position of defending Patrick Manning.
