Colin Steer, Associate Editor - Opinion
A TELEVISION newscast last week quoted Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller as saying, in assessing her presentation in the Budget Debate, that on a scale of one to 10, she would give herself a grade higher than 10.
That mathematical appreciation is understandable. For many years, Mrs Simpson Miller frequently obtained more votes - above 100 per cent - than registered electors in her South West St. Andrew constituency.
The tragedy in her assessing her presentation as 'excellent' is not in her declaration, but that she might actually believe it.
VICTIM-DEFENCE ARGUMENT
Her supporters do her a disservice when they charge that she is being especially harshly criticised either because she is a woman or because she is from the lower class.
Of course there is some of that, but there are many people who simply want to see the country go forward who find the statements she has made so far not to be well thought out - an assessment that would have been made of anybody who made them.
This victim-defence argument was used of P.J.Patterson in respect of colour. After Patterson's first budget presentation as Prime Minister, in reference to his tentative approach, Anthony Abrahams asked on the Breakfast Club whether he looked 'prime ministerial'.
Many of Patterson's supporters excoriated Abrahams who they said was criticising him because he was black. To which Abrahams responded, that his supporters were not helping his cause by referring to his blackness as their main line of defence.
In the case of Mrs Simpson Miller, nobody pushed her from a bridge into a piranha-infested river leading to Jamaica House.
She jumped in insisting that she was as capable of swimming with and perhaps better than her male colleagues. It is, therefore, supremely ironic that she should now be asking to be assessed not as prime minister but as a woman.
NO WEAKNESS
Among the women prime ministers the world has seen - Israel's Golda Meir, India's Indira Gandhi, Dominica's Eugenia Charles, Britain's Margaret Thatcher - they were adjudged to have been capable and tough, offering appropriate leadership in times of crises.
That is what the Jamaican public expects of Mrs Simpson Miller. There is no inherent goodness or weakness in her being a woman.
The claim that she was being harshly heckled by the Opposition members last week 'because she is a woman' does not square with the facts. There have been many vigorous heckling sessions in the nation's Parliament.
Among the chief 'set-ons' on the Government side in this Parliament is Donald Buchanan who can be expected to say something to 'rile up' the Opposition. And years ago in the 1980 Budget presentation, a contentious Dr. Percival Broderick was ordered from the House by Speaker Dr. Ripton MacPherson for persistently needling Michael Manley during his presentation.
Politicians of all persuasion have been subjected to heckling inside and outside of Parliament and have soldiered on.
Mrs Simpson Miller is no political neophyte unaccustomed to dealing with fiery political confrontations. She is a political Amazon par excellence.
On election day some years ago, she led a group of young PNP toughies into Olympic Gardens to 'rescue' votes for A. J. Nicholson that had reportedly been captured by thugs allied to the JLP's Ferdie Yap Sam.
In the 1993 election campaign she was assigned by her party, as she later told reporters, to monitor the Corporate Area to ensure that things went well for them. Such 'monitoring' meant roaming in convoys of three or four vehicles with some rough-neck characters to trouble spots.
MUST FUNCTION
So, Mrs Simpson Miller is capable of giving as good as she gets. She must be assessed on the substance of the ideas she brings to the table for national discussion. It is not enough to blame her script writers for a bad job. Public speakers routinely reject or have the material presented to them re-crafted.
If she was being set up, as has been suggested, by less than loyal aides who were tardy with supplying information, as an astute politician she must be savvy to the potential for these things and be as wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove.
The country must not cut her any slack on the basis of gender or any other perceived handicap.
She campaigned for high office and she must function in a manner befitting the position - in style and substance.
