Winning elections requires campaign platform and strategy

Jul 09, 2011 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
I published a letter in KN in which I took Dr. Joey Jagan to task for not knowing that “Coalition Government” and “Shared Governance” are two very different animals.
I also made the argument that the ruling PPP can be defeated if only the Opposition PNC understood the need to have an “Indian strategy”: an Indian platform and campaign style to win over 5-6 percent of the Indian vote.
Elsewhere, in several other letters, I have argued that the PNC needs to reinvent itself: adopt a multi-racial image and that it would be helpful to elect a Presidential candidate of Indian ethnicity.
I have also pointed out that there is a huge problem of lack of trust between the Indian electorate and the PNC, and to overcome this lack of trust, the PNC should apologize for its 28-year long oppressive rule. And candidate David Granger should also apologize for the army’s involvement in all those fraudulent elections. Overcome distrust, win confidence, then communicate your platform ideas with your targeted constituency are keys to winning votes.
In my July 5th letter, I said PNC supporters and writers like Mark Archer and Lurlene Nestor should stop railing about the ruling party’s corrupt rule and begin figuring out how to communicate with the Indian electorate. Such railing does not help to win trust with a disaffected constituency. This is what caused the PNC’s Mark Archer to literally hit the roof.
July 7th – Mark Archer used up most of his letter to rail about the ruling party’s corruption. How can I convince Mr. Archer or Lurlene Nestor that these railings will not win a single Indian vote? It is like the fox railing to the mountains or the wind.
It is abundantly manifest that the PNC and their writers do not have a campaign strategy to win an election. They have never done a study of the people’s voting behaviour and this failure is what is responsible for the absence of a campaign platform and strategy.
Elections are never won by railing against the ruling party or shouting fire. They are won by learning to communicate your platform ideas with your targeted constituencies.
The United States comprises hundreds of ethnicities and nationalities (a largely immigrant population). The successful candidate for a local, citywide, statewide or national race has to have a subtle and not so subtle strategy and platform for all these different communities, because they all have different interests.
In Iowa, it is about agriculture policies; in Maine it is about the interests of blue collar workers; in New York it is about which candidate has the strongest pro-Israel policy, and so on. Mark Archer believes one policy fits all constituencies. I would bet Mark Archer is from planet Mars or Pluto.
Consider one successful candidate, Ruben Wills. This candidate is Jamaica-born. Four years ago he decided he wanted to run for the City Council in my district of Queens, New York.
A quick study revealed to him there is a large Indo-Caribbean and Asian-Indian community in the district. He decided he must learn quickly to communicate with these communities.
Vishnu Dutt, a Guyanese, introduced Mr. Wills to the community leaders, and thereafter Mr. Wills never missed an opportunity to show up at a Guyanese community event – just to shake hands, give a two-minute speech, and ask for their vote. I saw him at the Nareesa Palace when President Jagdeo showed up there with U.S. Ambassador John Jones three years ago, at the memorial service for Prakash Gossai, at the Indo-Caribbean Senior Center – and at hundreds of other events.
End result: Ruben Wills was elected to the City Council with the help of the Indo-Caribbean vote, and this in spite of Guyana-born candidate Albert Baldeo running in the same race. Ruben Wills’ success was due to good communication skills and his ability to do coalition politics – building coalitions of African, Hispanic, Indo-Caribbean as well as other native communities, Irish, Italian etc., who live in his district.
Can the PNC leaders David Granger and Robert Corbin show up at every Indian coastal village from Springlands to Pomeroon?
Of course, they must learn the tools of the trade – communication, platform, build trust with the Indian constituency. And, do coalition politics as Ruben Wills did successfully.
An African-Guyanese woman in New York told me recently that there are not enough African-Guyanese in Guyana to elect a PNC candidate, and therefore the PNC should try something else: elect an Indian-Guyanese to be their leader who will be more successful in building bridges with the Indian community.
Who is Cammie Ramsaroop, Amna Ally, Clarissa Riehl? Are they to be used only as window-dressers or are they assets who potentially can help the party transform itself into a genuine multiracial party and develop a successful platform and win votes?
Mark Archer also mentioned something called APNU, A Partnership for National Unity. Partnership of what? Unity of whom? These individuals have no following, these party outfits are empty vessels with no support. Winning votes is not about combining a few empty shells of organizations. It is about doing hard work among the people whose confidence and vote you need. Mark Archer wrote these things about me: “Cynical PPP advocates like Mike Persaud seem to prefer to embrace [ethnic] triumphalism cloaked as democracy”; “Mr. Persaud will never see the merit of a government of national unity”. I have condemned Indian and African triumphalism and ethnic parties and ethnic politics in perhaps stronger language than any other Guyanese writing in the letter columns. If Mark Archer cannot get this right, who I am and what ideas I represent, what else would he get right?
Guyana does not need empty-vessel-groups masquerading as APNU. All parties should compete for votes in the free marketplace. At the conclusion of the elections, if no party receives 51 percent of the votes, let like-minded parties form a coalition. The clause in the constitution stipulating that party A with the largest plurality of votes automatically gets the presidency is meaningless if no other party wants to join with party A. If we learnt anything from the Arab Street protests it is that people’s power is far more powerful than that silly clause stuck into a constitution that was promulgated fraudulently on the nation.
In the meantime, I shall beckon Mark Archer to come down from Mars or Venus. Stop railing and learn to do the hard work of winning votes.
Mike Persaud

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