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Robert Buddan, ColumnistCurrent Don Anderson polls have come at an important time, a time when the People's National Party (PNP) leadership transition is turning its last few corners and when the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP)
is set to hold its first general
conference under Bruce Golding's leadership.
Jamaica is indeed lucky to have the Stone and Anderson polls, along with private political polls, business and consumer surveys, and other tracking methodologies. Jamaica has the longest, strongest, most continuous and reputable record of political polling in the Caribbean. The tradition goes back 34 years when a young Carl Stone entered the field of public opinion polling in 1971.
legislative elections
The only other Caribbean country with some record of polling is Trinidad and Tobago, thanks largely to Professor Selwyn Ryan's work. Haiti stands at the other extreme. Despite the presidential and legislative elections set for December 27, for a field of 35 presidential candidates, over 1,300 candidates for the 129 seats in the legislature, and more than 40 political parties, no poll exists against which to measure popularity and eventually judge the credibility of the elections.
Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean represent a good market for polling. Hopefully, the Stone and Anderson organisations will go regional. We all need to know more about how the people of the region feel towards the CCJ, federation, West Indies cricket, plans for the World Cup of Cricket, press freedom, crime and violence, freedom of movement, a regional airline, the PetroCaribe agreement, the United States embargo against Cuba, disaster preparedness, HIV/AIDS, the University of the West Indies (UWI), and so on and on. We need a database of Caribbean public opinion for the simple reason that the opinion of the people of the region must count.
Polling Political Cycles
When Carl Stone conducted his first poll, the state of Jamaican politics and public opinion had some similarity to the present. Stone's first polls revealed a high level of antipathy towards politics by the young and great interest in a third party.
However, as Stone argued later, interest in and enthusiasm for politics were revived by the dynamism of Michael Manley's personality, his captivating ideas for social change and his mobilisational and communicative style. A cultural revolution in politics consequently took place in the 1970s, only for a counter-revolution to set in during the 1980s marked by a backlash against charismatic, ideological and mobilisational politics.
Today, a similar sense of antipathy, which we now know to be much more global, is evident as nationalism gives way to globalisation, ideology to issues, politics to economics, and social activism to personal politics. The Jamaican political system is at a point at producing another generation of leaders just like it was in the late 1960s when Hugh Shearer and Michael Manley took over the JLP and PNP.
Who among the new generation Golding, Simpson Miller, Phillips will be the star of the class and how will that person win back the faith of Jamaicans to the system of government and politics as they seek to transform the society into something qualitatively different, as they undoubtedly must?
The first results on Bruce Golding's leadership are not encouraging. The Anderson polls have raised issues about the performance of the JLP under his leadership. The party is reported to say that it will, in fact, raise the issue of Mr. Golding's performance at its conference next week.
The public is not pleased with Mr. Golding but the fact that the party will review his leadership indicates one major difference between Golding's JLP and what had existed before. When a senior party member makes an almost immediate statement that the matter of Mr. Golding's leadership will be raised in party councils, it shows that the party is no longer run by one man and that even its top man can be called to give account of his perceived failings.
It is good to see this kind of democracy emerging in the JLP. This will of course make for an interesting public session of the JLP's conference. Mr. Golding will have to defend his performance as leader in the past 10 months.
He might note some positive differences. One of the most interesting was the party's acceptance of an invitation from the Communist Party of China to visit the country, an invitation that Dr. Horace Chang and Delroy Chuck took up. Considering the anti-communist dogmatism of the past JLP, this signals a new pragmatism. China is a very important partner to Jamaica and the Caribbean. It is now left for the JLP to condemn the U.S. embargo against Cuba, another important Jamaican partner and friend of countries ranging from communist China to capitalist Canada and socialist Spain. The JLP must make the final step out of the shadows of the Cold War.
reacting to the diaspora
Another positive difference is that Mr. Golding has taken to meeting Jamaicans in the Diaspora. He wishes to broaden the appeal and understanding of the JLP's positions. He wants to make the party more global. Mr. Golding now needs to establish more contact with Caribbean people and Caribbean leaders in the region, something previous JLP leaders, with Hugh Shearer being an exception, were poor at. In fact, it follows that they had a poor record on Caribbean regionalism. Mr. Golding must travel through the region and explain to Caribbean people what his party's position on the CCJ is, and indeed, what its position on federation is. We in Jamaica would also love to know.
The JLP also has a poor record on post-Duvalier Haiti. It had initially threatened protests in Jamaica if Aristide, forced out of his own country by foreigners, was given temporary exile here. Mr. Golding has said that Jamaica should be careful not to anger the United States. Now the worse kind of pragmatism is the kind that throws principles out the window. There are very principled reasons why Jamaica and its political parties must support democratisation in Haiti and criticise those, however, rich and powerful they might be, when they do the opposite.
Mr. Golding has made a positive difference by declaring that the police have a right to pursue criminals in Tivoli Gardens or wherever they might be, another important break with the past. He has come out boldly for the death penalty and for security to be a major issue for his party, a position justified by poll findings about what concerns Jamaicans the most.
There is one area of leadership that Mr. Golding has not sorted out. At his inauguration as party leader in February he was very clear that 'one hand can't clap' and that dialogue with the
government would be important. Yet, the JLP is still too quick to fall back on the old politics of parliamentary walkouts and street protests. This disease has now spread to its Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation Councillors. On the morning that the disappointing poll results about his leadership came out, Mr. Golding told his supporters that the party would begin election-related campaign protests next January.
Old habits die hard. Ten months is clearly not long enough to properly judge Mr. Golding but it is enough to understand why people still have great reservations about his leadership. He has made a difference but he still has to be consistent and convincing.
Email the Department of Government at: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm
