We may get from the People's National Party (PNP), after all, the substantive discourse which most Jamaicans hope will characterise the leadership contest between the incumbent, Mrs Portia Simpson Miller and Dr Peter Phillips, one of her deputies.

It is no secret that the PNP, which was once seen as a movement founded on big ideas, has, for several years, been bereft of intellectual moorings. It became good at winning general elections, but having won, the party seemed not to know how to leverage its victory.

It was not just that under the PNP government of recent years, the country failed to achieve substantial economic growth. That happened, too, in the 1970s. But at least then, even if one disagreed with the party's ideology of democratic socialism, and the deep schism it helped to engender in the society, there was at least a sense that the PNP stood for something. It had a philosophy and ideological template from which to fashion a society.

PNP drifting

Global realities, not least the end of the Cold War and the defeat of communism, undermined old political certainties. But the PNP drifted more than most, failing to articulate a vision for Jamaica; that big thing that the country could be. Norman Manley, for instance, had self-government and a faith in the capacities of the Jamaican people. Michael Manley saw his call as a mission to reorder the society along socialist lines.

Since then, there has emerged an atrophying of the politics of ideas and an incapacity, it seems, to inspire Jamaicans beyond themselves, or even to try. We sensed an awareness of these failings in Dr Phillips' arguments offered in defence of his leadership challenge, less than two and half years after the elevation of Mrs Simpson Miller and at a time that the PNP may be returning to electoral ascendancy.

Dr Phillips acknowledged the crisis in which the Jamaican society finds itself, and the role of a deeply partisan politics in getting us to where we are. He insists that the old politics can't work; transformation demands a broad national consensus, which must begin within one's party and the eschewing of old attitudes.

It is heartening that this appears to be a debate that Mrs Simpson Miller does not intend Dr Phillips to hog. She has clearly begun to frame concepts of her own about the organisation of society, which, perforce, would impact the posture of her party.

In an article contributed this week to the Sunday Gleaner, Mrs Simpson Miller highlights this need for a commonality of purpose in defining the 'Jamaican Dream', one that embraces the wellspring of pride among the Jamaican people.

"The absence of this unity significantly limits our chance of success, and the task becomes immeasurably harder," she wrote. It is an obvious point, but one that has to be made. More importan, it has to be believed and embraced.

The question for Mrs Simpson Miller - and no less for Dr Phillips - assuming that they believe, is how they intend to transform into truly post-partisan leaders. Mrs Simpson Miller, in an effort to define herself apart from Dr Phillips, whom her campaign has sought to cast as elitist, calls for a rejection of 'top-down approach' prejudice.

The framework has been drawn, now for the substance.