It's
been a long time coming!
So what's
new eh?
Parliament
dissolved!
Not sure what was all the excitement about,
because that was as predictable as anything this century.
Having cast his lot by suspending parliament
six months ago to avoid a total collapse of his government -- in his "nobody
can cheat me of my time" mode -- time effectively ran out on the Tillman
Thomas administration on Wednesday.
The brief TV appearance on Wednesday night
was not just an acknowledgment of that, but a sad requiem on four and a half wasted
years that started with so much potential.
And though the government has technically 90
days to hold a general elections -- expect one in less than a third of that
time.
The financial and political realities -- and
the legal budgetary requirements -- have further boxed in this administration.
Traditionally, politicians under the Westminster
system use the non-fixed date approach to spring surprises to their advantage.
In this case though, there are no surprises
to be sprung.
In the end, it is not any parliamentary maneuver,
nor any protest in the streets (surprisingly there was not any) -- but it is
time, that will eventually "cheat" the Prime Minister of his time.
As he tried to figure his next move, there
was always one thing this administration feared more than anything the likes of
Keith Mitchell, Peter David or Glynis Roberts could have thrown at them -- the
clock!
And for all its flaws, this is what makes
this democracy so amazing. Time eventually gets you.
And as time creeps up on this government, you
run the range of emotion -- you want to scream and cry; and jump for joy all at
the same time.
Last night I was watching the Karl Hood clip
from that 2008 classic campaign at La Borie where he said: ""They can
go as long as they want and do what they want, but election must call. This
corruption in the land must end."
It is canny how history and events repeat themselves.
Far removed from all of this -- 20 to 30
years from now -- when we take out all the emotion of this time, we will come
to solemnly reconcile about what a waste of opportunity and potential the last
four and a half years had been.
If we never knew, we now know though --
leadership matters.
When people ask me what went wrong, I have a
one-word answer: Leadership.
I was told a story this week by a (former)
NDC activist who said that a party campaign team had come to visit him
recently, trying to "reactivate" his community role of the last
campaign.
His retort to them was -- "why are you
coming to me now? At the convention in September,
you did not just expel Peter David and Glynis Roberts and them. You expelled
the people."
Which brought me back to a commercial, that I
had personally got up after midnight one night over five years ago and coined -
that said in part -- "we had a government that has been choosing wrongly
for us, but now the people have a chance to choose for themselves."
Indeed
it is canny how history and events repeat themselves.
There is a song that goes something like
this... "it's been a long, a long time coming..."
I tried singing it last night, and it tore me
up.
