unfortunately this may be the problem...look at the last paragraph in particular...
In Singapore, the party in power offers new faces
by Seth Mydans Updated 09:15 PM Apr 19, 2011SINGAPORE - After a painstaking search involving hundreds of man-hours and very likely thousands of cups of tea, Singapore's overpowering political machine, the People's Action Party, has presented to the public its carefully vetted crop of next-generation candidates for an election it is virtually certain to dominate again.
The party, which has never been out of power since Singapore became a self-governing state in 1959, now holds 82 of the 84 elected seats in Parliament and is expected to come close to that number again in the next election. It has introduced 24 new candidates over the past month, in a regular generational cycle that party leaders say is more significant than usual this year because the new slate probably includes the next prime minister.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has not yet announced the date of the election, which must be held by February 2012. But the People's Action Party, or PAP, introduced its election manifesto on Monday and is already on the campaign trail, as are several smaller parties.
While Singapore has a multiparty system, opposition parties are hindered by a lack of funds, by the reluctance of potential candidates to challenge the government, by a configuration of districts that favors the governing party and by the sheer organizational power of the PAP All 84 elected seats are being contested; the Constitution provides for the appointment of a small number of nonelected members.
But given the dominance of the PAP, the party's search process - involving background checks, psychological tests and rounds of what are known as "tea session" get-togethers - has become, for all practical purposes, the system by which Singapore chooses its government and leaders.
"The people we're bringing in now are not ready to be prime minister today," Mr. Lee said this month. "But somebody amongst them or amongst the next batch - but I hope amongst the earlier ones - one day I hope will be prime minister."
There are issues in this campaign - rising prices and rising immigration chief among them - but the elections are not so much about policy as about the people who will make the policies, mostly behind closed doors.
All of this is in line with the PAP's style of single-party governance: long-term decisions made by an inner circle, without the distractions of a substantial opposition or the time pressures of electoral deadlines. Public debate can make issues "harder to solve," the prime minister said this month.
"I would say that our concerns about adversarial politics is why we feel that it's good for us to have the PAP as a broad-based party representing many views and having some of these trade-offs and tensions resolved within the party rather than between parties," he said.
Asked whether there were not 20 people equally qualified to run against the PAP, Matthias Yao, who is retiring as a member of Parliament after four terms in office, said, "If we did have 40 good people, why not put them in one team, not two teams, when the other half by definition must oppose what the first team is doing?"
In the five years since the last election, the governing party has had "tea sessions" with more than 260 prospects, sometimes traveling abroad if these individuals had overseas jobs, Education Minister Ng Eng Heng, a senior party member, said in a recent forum.
"We didn't always tell them why we were talking to them," he said. "There were some tea participants whom we saw through changes in jobs. Some got married, pregnant, delivered. We saw them in various forms, antepartum and postpartum."
As part of the process, Mr. Ng said, "We shortlisted some for intense, eight-hour psychological profiling." Each prospect attended at least five tea sessions with members of a six-person interview panel, and the fittest of them were sent to a final session with the prime minister, said a member of the panel, K. Shanmugam.
The chosen 24 include civil servants, military officers and members of the business community; their average age is 40, and seven are 35 or younger. A number of them will run on multicandidate slates to represent what are known as group representation constituencies - a category in which the PAP has never lost an election.
The group representation process, which one critic has characterized as "force-feeding" selected candidates into government, has become a target this year for discontent over the selection process.
"It's just an expression of people's frustration with the system where any candidate you may not agree with gets a free pass," said Kin Mun Lee, who goes by the name Mr. Brown on his popular political Web site. "If your guys are good, put them up and give a good fight."
From the PAP's point of view, though, it makes good sense, he said. "Their idea is: 'I spent all this time looking for this talent, and this is my way of getting them into Parliament safely, where they can grow into the role and be all they can be."'
The candidate everyone is talking about is Tin Pei Ling, who at age 27 is one of the youngest the governing party has ever fielded and is struggling with questions of experience and gravitas.
A business consultant at Ernst & Young, a grass-roots party activist and the wife of the principal private secretary to the prime minister, she has become the target of exuberantly vicious attacks on the Internet, many of them focusing on the kind of girlish postings on Facebook that have become dangerous to job seekers of all stripes. A great deal of attention has been paid to a photograph in which she poses happily with a designer handbag.
This year, for the first time, the government has approved the Internet as a medium for political campaigning. With or without an official go-ahead, social media have swelled beyond government control, and Ms. Tin has become what one analyst called "collateral damage." Jokesters quickly christened her Sarah Pei Ling, after Sarah Palin, the former U.S. vice-presidential candidate.
In a speech Sunday, she acknowledged what she called a "storm of online criticism" and said, "I take the valid criticisms seriously and humbly."
"I am young," she declared. "I am a youth. But I can empathize with and understand the pressures that Singaporeans face."
Dressed in a bright yellow shirt, she sat one recent evening beside Mr. Matthias, the man she is slated to replace in Parliament, observing his work as he met with constituents in a housing project, hearing about their needs and grievances. The government makes no bones about providing better government services to constituencies that elect PAP candidates rather than members of the opposition.
Perhaps chastened by the rough ride she has faced on the Internet, Ms. Tin declined to talk to a visiting reporter.
For new members of Parliament like her, the first term may be mostly a learning process, Mr. Matthias said. In the three ensuing terms they are likely to serve, he said, "they contribute at the national level, and then make way for someone new."
Though many Singaporeans may feel excluded from this closed system of political selection, most end up voting for the People's Action Party, if only for the constituent services a governing party representative can bring them, said Mr. Brown, the political blogger. "What Singaporeans say and complain about the government and ruling party doesn't necessarily translate into votes against them," he said. "It's always nice to have an opposition, but not in my backyard." NEW YORK TIMES
So true. I am cautiously optimistic about the odds of WP prevailing in Aljunied--provided things do not get dirty and slimy on the part of PAP.
