Guyana and the USA: People’s power defeated the power of money

Nov 10, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

How President Obama got re-elected last week and how the PPP lost a majority of votes last year are miracles in politics. That is, of course, if you believe money can buy people, money can fool people and money can be used to achieve anything. Obama won and the PPP lost because in philosophy there is the concept that Cicero, the great Roman Empire philosopher, gave to human knowledge – reason.
Human beings are essentially rational, decent, right-thinking higher animals and they will listen to people who embody those qualities that they know human beings must have. The leaders of the PPP in the last general elections had to believe that they would have reached into the percentage of the sixties given the power of money at their disposal.
In the end they didn’t reach fifty percent. The power of the human mind defeated the power of money in Guyana’s 2011 national elections.
So when you saw the enormity of resources the PPP had yet lost, you emotionally concluded that a miracle occurred. I saw these massive resources for myself. All Guyanese did. Billions of dollars in state funds went into the PPP’s campaign.
The PPP had six media houses –Guyana Times, Chronicle, NCN radio, NCN television, channel 65 and channel 69 – on their campaign bandwagon. State facilities like GuySuCo were thrown into the PPP’s bandwagon. And in the end they failed to get a parliamentary majority and only one reason, yes, one reason explained that – the opposition did not get into an intensive and extensive meet-the-people regime as the Obama team did.
Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod told Al Sharpton on MSNBC that in the last week of the campaign, the Republicans spent one hundred million dollars on advertisement. It was a colossal outpouring of money by the Republicans. The PPP did the same in Guyana. But Guyanese listened to Nagamootoo and the AFC in Berbice and the American people listened to Obama. Money cannot buy people. Money cannot work miracles.
The PPP lost in Guyana and Obama won in the US for one fundamental reason – Homo sapiens are reasonable creatures and will listen to those who are good humans and have good intentions and they will turn their backs on people who have horrible opinions and have done bad things.
Americans knew that Obama did not take them out of an unspeakably terrible recession. But they believe if he could he would have done it. They believe he is a man who will not hurt his country and one who has the best of intentions.
Latinos voted for Obama because they believed he would not be insensitive to the plight of illegal immigrants. Latinos voted against Romney because they know that the Republican Party is anti-immigrant. Afro-Americans voted against Romney because it is clear to all of them that the Republican Party has not been traditionally fond of the Afro-American population and tend to be racist.
The lower middle class, the essential middle class, the working strata, and the poorer folks went overwhelmingly for Obama because it was clear to them on a sunny day that he is a politician that caters for their needs.
These class categories rejected Romney because the Republicans are seen in the US and the world as the party of the rich and wealthy
The unleashing of countless dollars in the campaign didn’t help the Republicans. Americans voted for self-preservation. The Americans turned their backs on politicians they felt would not help the non-propertied classes.
In Guyana in November last year, the combined opposition failed to tap into the fundamental rationality that inheres in human beings. The PPP was extremely vulnerable, but the AFC and APNU lacked the Obama touch. Guyanese, despite the race cancer, couldn’t reconcile themselves with a government that chased poor vendors, many of whom were single mothers, off their selling sites; denied sugar workers a decent salary increase; lived in affluent styles with corrupt money; refused to develop a country that they were in charge of for 20 years.
It was David Granger who said on television to Christopher Ram that he would like to know where the 100,000 absentee voters went. They didn’t go anywhere. They were right here among us. But APNU didn’t do what the Obama planners did. The meet-the-people intensity was not there.
In Region Three, the AFC didn’t campaign at all. Both APNU and the AFC failed to deliver the coup de grace, because unlike the Obama team, they didn’t campaign with extreme rigour and endless energy. If they did, history would have been different today.

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