Bagan Pinang: Practical Level politics.

This coming by election in Bagan Pinang presents UMNO people a lab to test out the meaning of strategies and tactics. UMNO can't change its past. It must look forward. Looking forward requires an understanding of what strategy amounts to. It's essentially looking forward. It provides the guidelines for growth. With strategies, you are in reality, speaking of future performance gaps and how you are going to overcome them.

Being tactical is more or less present or now orientated. It is about present performance gaps and how you are going to overcome them in order to support the strategies. The gaping thing now is to plug the demoralising losses.

What elements at present, satisfy this need? One, a winnable candidate. Two, not giving up any advantage. The winnable candidate may be disliked by some, but the more important question is, is he winnable? If yes, forget about the past. People will continue to hantam him anyway. If they looked hard enough, there will always be material to persecute him. Isa Samad is a winnable candidate and can be persecuted. But he is winnable and that's what UMNO wants now. It's now oriented and it's tactical.

The advantage? The presence of voters by post. The general who uses the terrain to his advantage wins. The general who sacrifices the advantage loses. So Mein General... You want to win Ja?

By the way, I get this sense that many people don't understand what postal votes mean. It does not mean you vote through the mail. The 'post' is the army base where the soldier or military voter is based. He casts his votes inside the army or military premises under the same arrangements as civilian voters do. That is people from SPR are there as are representatives of the contending parties. They have with them the register of military voters. You vote according to the post you are stationed and you are a registered voter in that particular camp. You don't post your votes through the mail.

Strategy is 'any long-term plan', which will be the product of 'the art of conducting a campaign and manoeuvring an army.' Tactics are 'purposeful procedure' achieved by exercising 'the science or art of manoeuvring in presence of the enemy'. The two are as close as Siamese twins. Companies need the twin skills - those of the strategist, who can select the right long-term objectives and envisage the means that will reach those goals: and those of the tactician, who will deploy those means in a series of manoeuvres - short, medium and long-term - to achieve the desired ends.

What about the higher issues of morality, integrity, honesty and all that? Values? These are long term objectives more in tune with issues of strategy. Hardly issues at all at practical level politics. Only engaging topics for debates to impress audience and the pastime to bloggers like Sakmongkol.