Category: Politics

When making small talk with regular folks here (soup vendors, satay sellers, taxi drivers, etc.), the question of what I do often comes up.  When I say that I study Indonesian politics, almost without fail the next question is "can you tell me who’s going to win the election in 2009?"  The answer to this question is that I can sort of explain how different candidates are polling right now, but that’s not the same as actually knowing who’s going to win in 2009.  And everyone knows this information.  I’m not shedding any new light on that topic by recounting the same information that everyone sees in the newspaper already.

But there is a larger point, though, which has been made by Andrew Gelman quite elegantly in the US case.  It’s not clear that using poll numbers right now to say something about elections in the future makes any sense at all.  The question normally posed is something like "if the election were held today…"  But the election is not being held today.  It’s not clear what the response to that question signifies.  Sometimes they ask "in the upcoming elections…," but what this really means is something like "if you could cast your vote right now for the election in 4 months so that nothing else that happens between now and then will affect your vote."  It is probably correlated with what people think about their choices right now, but that may or may not be correlated with what is going to happen 4 months from now (or 9 months from now in Indonesia).  Note, of course, that this does not mean that the polls are meaningless, or that poll results are just noise.  Gelman links to a very important paper of his that argues that changes in polls as elections approach reflect how voters are learning about where the candidates stand; in another paper they find more evidence of this.  So as people learn that Obama is a liberal communist Muslim radical Christian, their answers will change accordingly, and we will basically be able to predict election results based on simple fundamentals that always work like age, race, income, and the national economy.

Incidentally, I am a big fan of Andrew Gelman’s blog.  Its appeal is probably mostly to academic types, but I like how crabby he is about people who make inscrutable graphs in their presentations of data.

You take one day off of checking the Malaysian news to see what’s going in that country’s fast-moving political scene, and you come back to this.

"Sodomy claim by aide is  fabrication, says Anwar."

I don’t know much more about this story than what I see here.  The accuser is an aide who was hired by Anwar in March of this year.  I can tell you that the opposition media are claiming that this is a complete fabrication and that the government has engineered these allegations in order to derail his political fortunes.  I have also learned from the Malay-language media that the word for sodomy in Malay is liwat.  Never know when that might come in handy.

The wider political context is more interesting.  In 1998 Anwar was accused of sodomizing his driver, his advisor, and his wife’s driver.  He was tried and convicted of this in 2000, although the charge was thrown out in 2004.  The general consensus among Malaysianists is that this charge was false and politically motivated, and meant to be both embarrassing (since now he had to talk about it) and to paint Anwar as immoral, offending the sensibilities the country’s Malay population.  Since then, Anwar has been in jail, was released, and was behind the stunning electoral success of the opposition in March 8 elections of this year.

I have met Anwar.  I support his struggle for democracy in Malaysia, even if we differ on some smaller points.  I tend not to believe anything that the Malaysian regime says when it comes to the opposition.  I think that it’s no accident that Anwar has been accused of sodomy at the very time when the regime faces its largest threat from the opposition in decades.  That the accuser is a recently-hired aide is probably no accident either.  That said, I have to be careful to tread lightly here–think of how many American politicians lead double lives in the sex department!  I think that the safest position is that Anwar should be considered innocent until proven guilty, and that I am inclined to believe (1) that he is innocent and (2) that he will not get a fair trial if it gets that far.

UPDATE. I should make clear that even in the unlikely event that Anwar were bisexual, it shouldn’t matter. Although, we all know, it probably would.