The 100 Days Myth.

The New Deal

The 100 days is one of the most nefarious myths culled from American politics. Coincidentally, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah in a speech at a private function mentioned the term, a New Deal. The American president most associated with the term new deal was FDR.

In one sense, PM Najib is making a series of deals with the rakyat. He has offered them a slew of changes with the aim of saving UMNO and the country. We have a possible analogy between our PM Najib and FDR.

Franklin D. Roosevelt took office at a time of national emergency when the instruments of government under Herbert Hoover and his laissez-faire Republican predecessors were wholly inadequate to the challenge. FDR went into action with a slew of reforms and invented new institutions to save the American economy.

PM Najib came into power after a brokered transition which allowed PM Najib to move into office and Pak Lah to ride into the sunset a happy and prosperous man. He (Pak Lah) was able to say patronisingly- the man I chose has done well. History will judge this to be a misstatement. The UMNO warlords, scared out of their wits, chose Najib over Pak Lah. What Pak Lah is saying so that he won't miss out on the euphoria- indeed Najib is a better PM than he can ever be.

In a similar sense, PM Najib came into power at a time of national emergency too. At the last general elections, if Pak Lah can be compared to Hoover, his administration of which PM Najib was a part, promised security, peace and prosperity. The instruments of government under Hoover Pak Lah- the police, (security), the judiciary and the civil service and the economy are in disarray. The RM8 billion given to the Police to enhance their operations and management have not result in better crime prevention. Peace has ceded place to anxieties given the negative perception on our judiciary. As for the economy, a new economic model is needed to replace the NEP which has become a tool to legitimise the seizure of economic opportunities by the elite. The stimulus packages which PM Najib announced, have not given results other than transferring funds to, again, selected beneficiaries.

Ok lah, let us be charitable a bit and accept that what PM Najib has done so far were well meaning. But they are not going to be boxed up in the 100 days myth created by the media. History has judged what FDR did as ushering in a brilliant moment. However those did not materialise within 100 days but came much later. It is highly improbable that substantial changes have taken place during PM Najib's hundred days. The 100 days thing is just a myth created by the local media, aping its nefarious kin in America.

Everyone is transfixed on talking about PM Najib's 100 days. It is as though the first 100 days provide a definitive stamp of leadership and governance. More important than offering excessive homage, we should ask, what has PM Najib done? A few changes were announced. Liberalisation of certain sectors within the service industry, liberalisation of selected financial sectors, the abolition of the 30% requirement, announcing that from henceforth scholarship will be awarded on the basis of merits, the teaching of science and maths back into Bahasa Malaysia. Perhaps all these will result in Malaysians moving into higher income groups.

Two important statesmen don't seem to be too enthusiastic about the first 100 days. Tun Mahathir thought the negatives have been bigger than positives but quickly added that his disapproval does not mean he doesn't support PM Najib. Clever.

In his aptly termed straight talk, Tengku Razaleigh has been more forthright. The 100 days thing is no big thing. The bigger picture is to evaluate what PM Najib has done against the promises made since March 8, 2008. Its not that Dato Najib took over after a general elections. He inherits what has been laid down by Pak Lah since the last general elections. PM Najib took over on 2^nd April 2009 in accordance to a peaceful transfer of power.

This 100 days thing is a much hyped concept. We may well be reminded by the caution given by Richard Nixon- The term has been an unreliable indicator for presidential success...

Roosevelt took office on the face of the worst panic and fear that engulfed America. He took over from Hoover who presided over the great crash and the deepest recession. During his first 100 days, he undertook 2 important measures. First alleviate the suffering of the poor, the have-nots, the marginalised by redistributing income. He took income from the rich to give to the poor. He didn't do a full Monty Keynesian- doing a deficit spending in wanton abandon. Two, he reorganised the economy.

Roosevelt's strategy consisted of two parts: first, provide relief for those who needed it most, which often involved a redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Second, provide long-lasting reform to the nation's economy, through reorganization and the creation of new agencies. Most of Roosevelt's policies can be described as "taking from one pocket to put in the other." Fixated with a balanced budget and fretful when it was not, Roosevelt made sure that anything given to one sector of the economy was taken from somewhere else. He did not accept Keynes' recommendation to begin heavy deficit spending, and did not do so until the threat of World War II forced him to.

What were the measures taken by PM Najib in these 100 days to provide relief to the poor and the lower income groups? The measures taken to liberalise the service sector were hardly impactful on Malay economic interest as Malay participation there is very insignificant. The liberalisation of the 30% quota rule will not cause the majority of Malays lose sleep. They will have insomniac effects only on those who have benefited by these secretive 30% quota rules.

Roosevelt's legendary "First 100 Days" concentrated on the first part of his strategy: immediate relief. In 3 months March to June 1933, FDR sent Congress a record number of bills, all of which passed easily. These included the creation of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Congress also gave the Federal Trade Commission broad new regulatory powers, and provided mortgage relief to millions of farmers and homeowners. FDR's first hundred days in office were a flurry of activity, with 15 major bills signed into law. Later presidents have aspired to match his record.

What we have heard after these 100 days, are the announcements made by PM Najib. None of these were sent to Parliament to be debated. Hence Tengku Razaleigh's call for relying more on enduring institutions and to policies must be heeded.

We need to trust less in personalities and more in policies, look less to politics and more to principle, less to rhetoric and more to tangible outcomes, less to the government of the day and more to enduring institutions, first among which must be the Federal Constitution.

Not only is this jubilation over these 100 days misleading, it is also crafted to give the impression that everything will be all right, with a change at the top. We are focussing on the clock maker and not the clock.

The success of the First 100 Days was important to Roosevelt and Americ- because it got the New Deal off to a strong and early start. Later, the conservative Supreme Court would declare much of the New Deal unconstitutional, and Roosevelt's political prestige would decline as his policies failed to resolve the Depression. If Roosevelt had not passed his agenda early, we would probably be without many New Deal programs Americans take for granted today.

PM Najib has missed the opportunities to initiate radical reforms in relation to the election manifesto of 2008. He could have shown he is serious about the security of this country by implementing the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the most important civilian security instrument- the Police. He should have seized the chance to implement the IPCMC. He should have seized the opportunities to get early wins.

And this is the key point; it's not that PM's hundred days will either doom him to failure or guarantee his success. It's that transitions are times when momentum builds or it doesn't, when opinion about the new leader begin to crystallize. It's a time when feedback loops - virtuous cycles or vicious ones - get established. Significant missteps feed downward spirals that can be hard to arrest. So it's far better for new leaders to get early wins that build personal credibility and political capital, rather than dig themselves into holes and have to clamber back out.

We are giving PM Najib pressure to work magic in a mere 100 days. After that what? PM Najib should study Kennedy. As Kennedy and his chief aide, Ted Sorensen, were writing his inaugural address, he said. "Let's put in that this won't all be finished in a hundred days or a thousand." Knowing this, Kennedy and Sorensen inserted into his speech its famous "thousand days" line. For good measure, they added an even bigger caveat, warning that the new administration probably wouldn't meet its goals "even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet."

JFK knew that the hundred-day yardstick for measuring presidential progress was as misleading as it is ubiquitous. The roundness of the number, though aesthetically seductive, is arbitrary; and while the short time span suggests swift, purposeful action, it really means that newcomers to the office will usually be too green to demonstrate true mastery.

Let's not do a media circus hype over these 100 days. The hundred days is surely, as historian Arthur Schlesinger once said, a "trap."