General Elections 2025

 

One of the most interesting things that's happened in the elections is WP not contesting in Marine Parade. There have been various reasons given for Marine Parade not being contested. One of them is that Tin Pei Ling's constituency has been absorbed into the GRC, and quite possibly she's become the flagbearer of that GRC. That would complete a very remarkable turnaround story / redemption arc that first started with her getting voted into the GRC on the coat tails of more illustrious figures, and people moaning about how unfair it was that somebody like her was parachuted into the position.

In GE 2011, the opposition parties managed to contest almost all the seats, other than LKY's. They gave all of Singapore the opportunity to vote, and this was the first time. There was talk of co-ordination between the parties. All the parties made inroads: SDP had rising stars like Vincent Wijeysingha and Tan Jee Say. NSP had unearthed a gem in Nicole Seah, although she was originally with Kenneth Jeyaretnam's party but had defected at the last minute. NSP also had a few former government scholars. Chiam See Tong's party seemed to get a few young and illustrious people.

Today, things have changed. Nicole Seah has switched to the Worker's Party, and later on, because of the affair with Leon Perera, left the party. Although Pritam Singh has made it clear that if they had a choice, they would have kept her on. Worker's Party seems to be going from strength to strength, attracting the right sort of people. (And, in Raeesah's case, the wrong sort of people too.)

The other opposition parties seem to have one each person with name recognition. Red Dot United has Ravi Philemon. SDP has Chee Soon Juan and Paul Tambyah. Paul Tambyah is an obviously qualified candidate, but seems to be a doctor first and a politician second. SDA revolves around Desmond Lim. PPP revolves around Goh Meng Seng, Singapore Democratic Alliance has had so many parties joining and leaving that I've failed to keep track. There are other short lived parties in Singapore: Singapore's voice, Singapore Justice Party, Reform Party, People's Power Party, Singaporeans First Party. None of them give a true impression that any real institution building has taken place. None of them give the impression that if they were suddenly put in charge of a town council in Singapore, they could fight the onslaught of lawsuits that would come their way.

Chee Soon Juan, to his credit, has kept the SDP going all these years. But it remains to be seen if he can take the next step. If his brand revolves around building Singapore into something that resermbles more a western democracy, that branding might be turning toxic in the near term.

Tan Cheng Bock is the leader of the Progress Singapore Party. He and Lee Hsien Yang will lend some name recognition to the party, and they have successfully contested in West Coast GRC, getting NCMP seats in parliament. I don't know if Leong Mun Wai's antics will bring progress for the party, going forward. And I'm not sure that the party will outlast Tan Cheng Bock heading the party.

There will be parties which put out a lot of candidates in the short term to contest seats in elections, but this is looking more like just an exercise in contesting the seats and giving everybody a chance to vote. In the 14 years since 2011, a consensus has emerged that WP will be the main opposition party in Singapore, and they are going to contest more seats if they could. There is a big difference with WP: they are no longer contesting seats to make up the numbers. They are not packing up the numbers. They have one of the most impressive slate of candidates, but because they no longer have Leon Perera and Nicole Seah, that may have disrupted their plans to contest in even more GRCs.

That's the first sign of not contesting in Marine Parade: they are not going to stand for elections there just to make up the numbers. They are going to make sure that every GRC they contest are genuinely competitive affairs. Pritam Singh is on the record as saying that they didn't want to lose Nicole and Leon but their hand was forced. And they may even make progress in spite of not having those two.

The second thing is that they have contested Tampines. To me, this is a sign that they're no longer comrades with fellow opposition parties per se. It doesn't matter of PPP wants to contest, it doesn't matter if NSP were there since 2011. The opposition parties are no longer fellow travellers or allies. WP will respect you if it thinks that you have a chance to win. I don't expect the WP to be picking fights with the SDP or the PSP (for the PSP, not while Tan Cheng Bok is still around). But if it thinks that you're just unnecessarily taking up the oxygen in the room, it will not hesitate to elbow you out of the way. If the NSP and the PPP were to lose their deposits in this election, then I think this will be a very significant election cycle for the opposition parties in terms of clearing out dead wood.

This reminds me of GE 2011 when there were a few surprises: Low Thia Khiang left Hougang to contest in Aljunied, and he was taking the biggest political gamble of his life. Win, and you would have ushered in a new era in politics where the opposition takes a GRC. You would have punished the PAP by taking out 3-4 of their biggest people. Lose, and you better hope that you can hold on to Hougang.

If you want to understand what a gamble it is, consider that Chiam See Tong took the same gamble, going out of Potong Pasir to run in Toa Payoh. He lost that gamble big, and meant that his party no longer had any seats. (But it was a gamble worth taking because even if he lost, he could look forward to a well-deserved retirement.) The shame of it all is that he should have put his most capable lieutenant to contest in Potong Pasir, instead of his wife, who was a newcomer, although that meant that he would lose control of his party to that lieutenant. Potong Pasir was winnable.

Tampines is a gamble for the WP. Not as big a gamble as Aljunied was: they would have faced quite a bit of criticism. But they were about the test the waters and find out what it's like to tread on somebody else's turf. This would be a precursor for them to cast a wider net around Singapore.

There have also been independent candidates in Mountbatten and Radin Mas GRCs. The rise of independent candidates is also something that gives the lie to the notion that many of the opposition parties are anything more than shell organisations that revolve around veteran opposition party members. Many non-WP opposition parties are no more than mere independent candidates. That's the thing about political parties in the democratic countries in Asia: they tend to revolve more around names than institutions. Only the more mature parties have made the evolution towards being real institutions. For example, if you wanted to stand for elections in WP, you'd have to work your way up from the bottom: you have to put in the hours volunteering and doing the grassroots work, before you were allowed to stand for elections.

And that also brings me to the thinking of Worker's Party people. You have to attract the best people, and you will do that by signalling to prospective opposition party candidates out there that you are the party that people want to join in order to maximise your chances of being elected into parliament. And you must do your part by showing that your party has the organisation, the structure and the ambition to keep on growing. Among the opposition parties, only WP has shown growth since 2011, although it is a remarkable level of growth. They will have to survive the trials and tribulations that the PAP will want to put them through, even though this is a kinder, gentler version of what LKY's PAP was all about.

So the policy of WP has to be geared towards being ambitious. Yes, it is one thing to assure the voters that they're going to only contest 1/3 of all the seats available in order to prevent a freak election result where they suddenly deny the supermajority to the PAP. Then they will be in uncharted waters, because you don't know and they don't know how they're going to handle the additional responsibilities. Pritam Singh has already grown the party to the point where he has a leader of the opposition office. After that, milestone after milestone will fall. The WP will grow to the point where they may win more than half of the seats that they contest in. Which means that the head to head record of the WP will favour WP. Then they may even get more than 1/3 of the seats. The milestones will fall quickly. And then what happens to Singapore? With every milestone that falls, Singapore will be in uncharted territory.

The PAP will also have to deal with the recent events. There was a time when I was able to rattle off the names of the PAP cabinet ministers with little difficulty. Today I am not so sure, and I see that a lot of the people whose names I was familiar with are leaving the scene: Heng Swee Keat, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Ng Eng Hen, Teo Chee Hean. S Iswaran and Tan Chuan Jin have left under less than honourable discharges. Some of the more prominent backbenchers are gone: Inderjit Singh and Tan Cheng Bok. Vivian Balakrishnan and Shanmugam have been absolved of some of their transgressions because there aren't enough replacements for them.

A PAP politician is no longer a job for life, and there is lesser stability in the personnel. They can be voted out. Consequently, this tends to work both ways. There is a sense that being a cabinet minister is a soldier for life, or answering a higher calling, but rather just another appointment in a series of plum jobs for capable or ambitious people.

It is notable that quite a few of the departures are people whose presence in the cabinet might steal the limelight away from Lawrence Wong. He has this vulnerability where everybody knows that his rivals for the hot seat are Chan Chun Sing, Ong Ye Kung, Heng Swee Keat and Tharman Shanmugaratnam. CCS and OYK still have to hang around and help run things, but there is the awkwardness of having more senior people around him – Teo Chee Hean and Ng Eng Hen and Tharman. Lee Hsien Loong was probably most cognizant that while it's good to have a former prime minister still in the cabinet, it would not serve Singapore well for the cabinet to be a gerontocracy, where all the former DPMs were kept around for the sake of keeping them around. I suspect that LKY's last official appointment - ”Minister Mentor” carried undertones of “why are you still here?”.

This plays into other big question going into this electoral cycle: who are the leaders of Singapore? Who are the PAP team and why are they obviously better than the leaders of the WP? In many respects, they still are, because I still can't imagine Pritam Singh and company leading Singapore. But the gap is narrowing and I'm not sure to what extent Singapore is running on autopilot or there are brave and bold leaders who are pushing Singapore in all directions. Or if there are brave and bold leaders everywhere in the ranks a few rungs below the cabinet, and the cabinet is just there to rubber stamp the brave and bold stuff coming up from underneath.

What comes of the contests in Punggol, Tampines and East Coast will be an augury of what's in store. In Punggol, the most formidable of WP's new faces will come up against a team of relative heavy weights in Gan Kim Yong, Sun Xueling and Janil Puthucheary. In East Coast, it will be a familiar name in Yee Jenn Jong, but he will be up against Edwin Tong and company. Tampines is where they have stacked the decks in Ong Lue Ping and Michael Thng, who have padded resumes.

Punggol and East Coast will answer the question of whether they can expand their empire. East Coast is a place which is traditionally favourable to the WP, because they almost won a seat there in the past. Punggol is a place which is similar to Sengkang – adjacent to Sengkang, and with a younger demographic which is usually more predisposed towards the opposition parties.

It's interesting that they didn't put one of their heavyweights to try and wrestle Jalan Kayu away from Ng Chee Meng. It was pretty obvious that he would be slated for that seat. There is an increasing number of SMCs, this time around, not least because of the political pressure to lower the average size of GRCs, because having GRCs with more than 5 people in them is just going to backfire on the PAP. It's interesting that Chee Soon Juan and Paul Tambyah are targetting the SMCs, but the WP doesn't seem to pay a lot of close attention to the SMCs. (But we'll never know, maybe they'll win another SMC other than Hougang this year?)

Tampines will answer the question of whether they can wrest a seat away from another opposition party. WP have won a four cornered fight before, in Punggol East. For them to win Tampines would be a great show of strength.

Tampines is a sign that WP is at last starting to make an incursion into a place that has traditionally been contested by another opposition party. There used to be a pact between opposition parties that they would not step on each other's toes. But this is the beginning of this pact falling apart. The WP, if it succeeds in wresting this party away from other opposition parties, might see this as a sign that they can repeat this in the future.

If they can do a Tampines, or if they just lose narrowly to the PAP, then they can identify other HDB towns which are like Sengkang. In the next election cycle, anything and everything would be up for grabs. Tan Cheng Bock will no longer be around. Chee Soon Juan would be growing old. The other opposition party veterans will be washed up old men. They can put their guys wherever they want: Choa Chu Kang, Jurong, Tengah, Bukit Batok, Woodlands. If the WP is in expansionist mode and they can attract enough good candidates for the next cycle, they could target one of the constituencies in the West and take advantage of the opposition parties which have failed to level up over the years like they have.

That is why I feel that the way that Marine Parade is being talked about is wrong headed. People were talking about WP “walking away” from Marine Parade, as though the WP owe the citizens an opportunity to vote in an elections. This is some wish for the PAP and the establishment to think of the opposition as cannon fodder, to serve as some kind of referendum on the PAP's performance, as had been the case for a few election cycles. No, we're in a new world, where the WP are in it to win it, and to expand their empire. Sure, the WP might have to indefinitely field less than 1/3^rd the candidates in order to reassure the public that they will not cause a freak elections result. But what message is that going to send to their own people and supporters? They have to exhibit some kind of ambition and desire, because this plays into the kind of supporters and candidates they will be able to attract. The WP is still able to attract good people, and this has to be seen as the core source of their strength moving forward. This is why the talk of “giving all Singaporeans the chance to vote” is a little misguided. The WP is now in the business of trying to win elections, not merely field candidates for the sake of turning up.

The PAP seems to have problems guaranteeing that their preferred candidates will get into parliament. It used to be a system where a senior member of parliament would anchor a GRC, and the newer folks would take over, and hopefully one of them eventually become an anchor himself. Now, there will be an expedited cycle where a new MP gets elected, and within 5-10 years, has to grow into the role of a minister of state, if not an outright cabinet minister, without a long bedding in period of learning on the job. And there were a lot of examples of what happens if the opposition were to win a new GRC. The casualties of Aljunied were George Yeo, Zainal Abidin, Lim Hwee Hwa and Ong Ye Kung. Only Ong Ye Kung has attempted a return. Now, Koh Poh Koon, Lam Pin Min and Ng Chee Meng has discovered that their pathway to the cabinet would not be as smooth sailing as it was for their forebears. Rightly or wrongly, this can have a negative impact on not only their career progression, but on the caliber of leaders who end up in the cabinet. In quite a few of these cases, they would have lost people they spent years cultivating for top jobs.

There are the people who are like Lawrence Wong, who can climb their way to the top, even beating hand picked rivals like Heng Swee Keat and Ong Ye Kung. But anybody else would find it harder and harder – they would have to be good both at administration and being a politician. Maybe WP is being nice to PAP by not spoiling their personnel plans by fielding a strong person against Ng Chee Meng, although they have targetted him for his silence on the income-allianz takeover issue. (Which, in fairness, they have to, otherwise they wouldn't be a real opposition.)

The WP seems to be the only party who doesn't have increasing recruitment problems. PAP, for the reasons I described earlier has its own problems. Harpreet Singh was tea-sessioned by the PAP and many years later decided to join the WP. Being a PAP MP seems to be no longer a sure thing. Instead, it now looks like hazardous work that needs to be handsomely compensated for. Apparently, 5 PAP MPs have stepped down after just one term. And this is a record number. Louis Ng was a vocal member of parliament, and he has also stepped down. It's no longer an attractive occupation.

In addition, the ability of WP to attract well qualified candidates tells me that the attractiveness of PAP and WP to highly qualified candidates is narrowing. You can go with PAP, who will still give you the best prospects of being elected. Or you can go with the WP, where you would be in a slightly more hazardous environment, but you have more freedom to speak your mind and push for the policies that you really want to see happen. And there does not seem to be any advantage of joining a non-WP opposition party, other than you can have a Red Dot party and call yourself “master of my domain”.

One thing that I have noticed a bit more of is: there are more pictures of Lawrence Wong in the PAP posters this time. This is a new team, and he is their best foot forward. He has the best PR amongst the cabinet, and this is why he was chosen to be their human face. This is almost going to be a referendum on him.

Why don't they have a picture of all the members of the cabinet? The big difference between the PAP is that they are the cabinet, they are the ones who are in the seats, have all the senior appointments and portfolios. Why are they not on the posters? This is, in part due to the succession difficulties I outlined earlier: Lawrence Wong is the guy who won the race with his rivals in the cabinet to be the prime minister. And I'm not even sure that people actually wanted to be the PM, or rather it was passed around to the guy who drew the shortest straw.

One of the problems of the 4G leaders is that they don't really have the charisma that the older generation had. Maybe they were no longer the alpha males who walked like kings. Maybe when they were told to listen to the people, they lost a bit of their aura, and had to sand off the rough edges in their personalities until there was nothing left. Either that, or the turnover in the cabinet was so rapid that the average tenure of people in the cabinet was shorter. (It would be interesting to do a statistical analysis of the average length of tenure in the cabinet, how that's changed over the years.) Then one has to answer the question of how long the ideal tenure is. If you like it to be long, then you can't also complain that the same few guys are always in the same old seats, because then you'd be contradicting yourself. But if you like it to be short, then you have to allow for the fact that the cabinet members have no name recognition.

It used to be LKY and a few of his henchmen. They all had charisma. LKY had the badass / strongman charisma. His deputies had the kinder / gentler charisma. Then the generation after him didn't have so much charisma: they were guys like Ong Teng Cheong, Goh Chok Tong, Richard Hu, Dhanabalan and Tony Tan. But they inspired trust, because they were the solid-as-a-rock company men who always got things done.

What do the new guys do? Some of them come across as being a little unlikeable. Some of them have an inquisitiveness that is appealing for a technocrat, except that in our day and age, technocrats are seen as the human face of the evil skynet. Chan Chun Sing is not unlikeable but he's also seen as gaff prone. Vivian Balakrishnan is seen as a bumbler who still somehow manages to keep his seat. Lee Hsien Loong has exhibited remarkable discipline in never saying anything of substance ever in public. To be fair, times have change and you cannot blame the younger generation of leaders for behaving more defensively in public. But this is the natural consequence of the changing times. At least we still have a Lawrence Wong who by all accounts seems to be the guy in our cabinet who has mastered social media. But does that mean that from now on, that's our criterion for choosing the leader of the party?

Moving forward, these are my experiences with elections in the past. Chen Show Mao made a famous comment during the 2011 elections: “how many 5 year cycles are you going to live through?” It's a little ironic that Chen Show Mao would later turn into one of the guys that the WP regretted getting into parliament, but that was a bygone era when James Gomez and Goh Meng Seng could be slated as WP candidates.

The first unforgettable elections were the 1991 elections, when 4 opposition candidates were voted into parliament. However, they were persecuted with much zeal. The 1997 elections were also a disappointment, where it was just Low Thia Khiang and Chiam See Tong versus all the other PAP MPs. The 2001 elections were held just after the 9/11 attacks and the fear factor drove a lot of people to vote for the PAP. The 2006 election were green shoots for the opposition party, when the Aljunied GRC came close to being toppled, and the early version of the internet forever changed the way that elections were contested.

The 2011 elections were unforgettable. They were the first time in my adult life that I got to vote, and by then I was on the wrong side of 30. Instead of the opposition party members being the whipping boys, we were greeted with the strange sight of a few of the opposition party members being even better campaigners than the PAP gang. Instead of the opposition members being bozos and clowns (for all his years of service, I would include Chee Soon Juan as one of the clowns) we had people we actually did want to give a chance to in parliament. If not for the GRC system, I don't know how many opposition members we would have elected into parliament. Nicole Seah would have beaten a weaker PAP candidate. So would Vincent Wijeysingha, if people didn't mind him being gay. Tan Jee Say seemed like a breath of fresh air too, but that was before all the red flags started appearing.

I went to some of the rallies and I felt for the first time, a different kind of patriotism – a voluntary and spontaneous pouring of joy. Many of us had been too scared to declare ourselves as opponents of the PAP, but I did bond with a few other people who declared themselves opposition supporters.

I was away from Singapore in 2015 and I didn't see what was happening on the ground. The WP had won the by-elections in Punggol East and Hougang, so it seemed that their star was ever on the rise. But Low Thia Khiang was a canny reader of the ground, and he realised that the ground was not sweet for the opposition, they were on the defensive, and the groundswell of grief over the recently deceased LKY meant they were playing defensive.

And then, there was 2016. The votes for Brexit and for Trump made me lose my faith in democracy. It was reasonable for me to want some opposition representation in parliament, but some of the talk was a bit to nativist and too close to Trumpism. What was disappointing is that Tan Jee Say set up a party called “Singaporeans First” party. He got a few of his friends to run a nativist agenda. I don't know enough about him, but he seems to be doing this out of resentment for being passed over for bigger and better things.

I started realising that as much as I had looked forward to the opposition making gains in parliament, this had to be done gradually, and at every step, you had to observe the nuts and bolts of what was going on in the government. I started realising that when I first followed politics, it was from the perspective of me being a young rebel, and I wanted democracy and division of powers not because I thought that it would make for a better Singapore (I was not entirely convinced about that) but because of what I felt to be the unfairness of how the opposition was treated, and because it didn't seem right that somebody else would make all the decisions and we would just have to follow them no matter what. I started doubting my earlier conclusions because it occurred to me that I wasn't even asking the right questions to begin with.

Yes, you could point out all the mistakes that the PAP was making. But anybody would have made mistakes at that point in time. You could not be comparing the PAP to a fabled unicorn who never made any mistakes. And you had to think hard about whether vigorous debate in parliament would have had the benefit of tempering unchecked power, or was just an opportunity for grandstanding and obstructing the correct decisions in parliament. I started questioning whether I was a lover of political drama, or whether I had real opinions about how I thought the government should be run. I came to the conclusion that if you weren't interested in the boring stuff, you simply had no business being in politics or trying to influence politics. But every few years when elections came, the idea of winning elections suddenly became salient again, and that's when I start to have opinions about elections strategies.

One of the nice things about the 2011 elections was that it was good natured. There were congratulations all around that the Singapore government was doing a good job. There was less of the pettiness and nastiness that was going all around the western world, with the rise of the tea party that would eventually end up as Trumpism. There was a fond farewell and sendoff for Chiam See Tong. People packed into arenas for the Worker's Party in sights that would stir dead people. I think there were fewer of the traditional post-elections “fixing” that went on in previous editions. We could at least be thankful that our democracy is nicer than it used to be, and nicer than in a lot of other western countries.

The thing about the opposition party winning more seats is that it could be a better thing, in terms of more enquiry and more deliberation when we wanted to go into new avenues. Or it could turn into a more politically fraught environment, where everybody would avoid doing the necessary but brave things, and go into the politically expedient stuff. We could end up flip flopping between different policies if we transited between different people in charge of the government.

For us to collectively make a decision that WP would have more than 1/3 of the seats would be to effectively vote for a constitutional change. The government would be run differently, for better or worse. I don't know if the changes would be reversible. I hope they are but how would we find out for sure?

The thing that the PAP has to prove is that they have one thing that the opposition does not: they have the actual business of running the country. Not merely being the co-driver who slaps the other guy in the face when he's going the wrong way, but the guy making all the decisions, rather than the guy who's just there to make suggestions about whether he's going the wrong way, but with no direct power to take over the wheel.

I think sometimes of the hidden forces in Singapore politics, and that is foreign policy. We are a small country, who's forever at the larger forces that take place in the international arena, who we are. People are always complaining about CECA and we may have had too many concessions to India lately but we needed to have better trade deals with them? Well there had to be more intelligent discussions about whether we got a raw deal after knowing the facts.

We have stalwarts of the foreign policy. I get how we had people who were quite active in foreign policy during the earlier days. There were people like Kishore Mahbubani, Bilahari Kausikan, George Yeo and Tommy Koh, who you may or may not agree with, but are nevertheless quite perceptive about the foreign situation in their own way. That's on top of Rajaretnam and Lee Kuan Yew himself, who made very fateful decisions early in our nation's development. But who are their modern equivalents? Is it Vivian Balakrishnan, who recently “liked” something on Facebook he shouldn't have? Of course, our relative importance has declined, because Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and even Malaysia have made great strides in recent times. And of course we no longer get to speak for them. But what we do on the foreign policy arena is even more important now, that we're in a unique position of being able to explain Asia and the West to each other.

We made some consequential and monumental decisions in the past. We decided whose side we were going to be on during the Cold War. We extended a hand to China when we realised they were coming up. We eased tensions between the various Asian countries. Yet the international arena has become so much more complicated today: we don't obviously know that we have to be on America's side anymore. We can't always deal with Trump's craziness, or even Xi's. We don't know what we're going to do if China were to invade Taiwan. Do we pivot away from Malaysia or towards them? Those are decisions of such great importance, we are living in such a dangerous world, and while we have a nice and fine university now with a lot of smart people to run it, the danger of making a big mistake is so much larger than before, and the world is so much more dangerous.

So that's the thing I want the PAP to answer – who are our new giants, and why are they fit to wear the shoes of their predecessors?

I think that there was something quite vindictive about how the PAP went after Tang Liang Hong, and it's a little strange how Lee Hsien Loong was bringing this topic up again after so many years. It's a sore wound that... should have been put to rest a long time ago. I don't think there was anything wrong in him pointing out that some part of the parliament's makeup wasn't really representative of Singapore society at large. The PAP felt so strongly about balancing the racial makeup that they introduced the GRC, both for better and for worse. So why was this topic off limits for people to talk about?

Anyway it's late and I think this post has devolved into aimless ranting. So let's just call it a day and look forward to more interesting stuff unearthing itself during the elections season.

America's relationship with Asia

America is, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, big. 

After starting to see Singapore from the perspective of outsiders, I came to see Singapore from the outside. Singapore is basically a Chinatown with an army. And it is in many ways parallel to the overseas Chinese communities. The Chinese communities in California are traditionally invisible - at least low key. But they developed in parallel with Singapore, so when I see Chinese Americans - or Asian Americans, for that matter, it's like seeing long lost relatives.

Asian Americans haven't made their mark in entertainment by and large. But the first railroads to California were built by Chinese people. There were the Chinse exclusion laws. The Civil Rights act was seminal to Black Americans. The Immigration act of the 60s was equally important to the Asian Americans, although it took a while to make its influence felt. The story of the Asian Americans need to be told a little more. The first reason is that Asians have contributed more than their fair share to the US being a scientific and technological powerhouse. We pulled our weight in building Silicon Valley, nobody doubts that this is one of the most important events of the early 21st century. 

The other reason is that Asian Americans, as well as non-China East Asians live in this space between America and China. America doesn't just reckon with a rising China, but also a rising Asia. Many of us feel the tug of both America and China. America, who at various points was at war with the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea and Japan, and at other points is allied with these 4 countries in counterbalancing the influence of China. 

Asians (including Asian Americans) have a relationship with the US which may be more distant culturally and emotionally. But this is a world which was modernised and shaped by the US, and in turn, is now shaping the US, because the rise of Asia will transform the relationship between US and the world. Don't forget that it was Pearl Harbour which blew the door open between US and the rest of the world and paved the way for internationalism, NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions. The paradox between Japan the enemy, Japan the ally, and Japan, the killer of the Detroit car industry. The paradox between Asia symbolising the past of ancient Asian civilisations, and Asia being the future because it is a rising power. Asian culture is not dead but it was forever transformed by American influence. 

Obama - who, lest we forget, grew up in Java - pivoted to Asia. The US is not post-racial. But just as the first Black president symbolises that race relations in the US is more complex than just black and white, the presence of Asians and Latinos reminds us that the US is a much more complex place than before. It's becoming something that more and more resembles the Asia of many races living side by side. Therefore it had to be Obama who pushed for the "pivot to Asia", meaning that USA's relationship with the world was not just trans Atlantic but also trans Pacific. 

The questions over the changes to the US' role in the world are not raised by Europe. They are raised by Asia. Something has changed recently - it is not America's relationship with Europe and Russia, although that is undoubtedly important. But the dramatic change is Asia. And those changes - the rise of Asia, the rise of Silicon Valley - are amongst what's at the top of peoples' minds when they are motivated to vote for Trump. 

Because Asia is an agent of change for the US (at least its relationship with the rest of the world) many of us are also pondering - just what is the US turning into? The US, which liberated us from the Japanese, who fought Korea and Vietnam, who helped build the trading system that became a buttress for Asian prosperity, and who is now nervously looking over its shoulder at China. The US, who was so preachy about freedom and democracy and is now struggling to make its democracy work. The US who, when they were the hegemons, believed in a free and open world, are now thinking in terms of empire, and preparing for a struggle against China and asking us to choose sides. There are cultural clashes all around. Asians and Americans do not have the same depth of conversations about culture, because there is not the same depth of understanding. The sheer diversity of Asians is already bewildering to Asians already, let alone Americans. Some Asians believe in democracy. Others believe in dictatorship. Both of these can nevertheless make their societies work. Some Asians see Americans as role models. Others see Americans as cautionary tales. Some of them remember the bravery they displayed in vanquishing the Japanese. Others resent the support Americans gave dictatorships in Philippines and Indonesians during the Cold War, or the role they played in the Great Asian Financial Crisis of the late 90s. Some Asians are amazed at the generosity of the Americans in sharing their technologies with the world, and others are appalled at the selfishness of big American corporations and their oligarchs. 

Some strange relationship is shaping up, and that strange relationship is driving plenty of changes all around the world. 

Retrospective on the 2024 US Presidential Election campaign.

There's finally a chance to see the election in some perspective. Each of Donald Trump's elections have been nail-biting.

For me, the trouble started with Joe Biden's nomination in 2020. He wasn't originally going to be nominated, but he was up against Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The moderates put their heads together, and decided to drop out and let him run. They wanted to avoid a repeat of 2016 where Hillary and Bernie Sanders fought each other so hard that it weakened Hillary just enough to lose her the election. So that's the first mistake, that there was a conspiracy against Sanders (again).

The second mistake wasn't his fault. Biden didn't have to be on the campaign trail because he could run against Trump from indoors, due to the COVID pandemic. Again, it seemed that circumstances were unnaturally aiding Biden, an impression that would come to haunt him.

The third mistake was that he agreed beforehand to name a woman as VP. This was an extremely significant choice, because it was likely that whoever he named would eventually be a presidential nominee in the future. (This turned out to be the case). This gave the impression that Kamala was parachuted into this position, instead of earning it on her own merit. And this impression was probably bolstered by the fact that Kamala had to fold her 2020 campaign before the primaries voting even started, and this seriously damaged her reputation to the extent that she never even recovered.

Now that I have the benefit of hindsight, I can look at the election and compare it to the 2016 election. Upon reflection, Hillary Clinton was a superior candidate to Kamala Harris in almost every aspect. She was one of the most qualified people to ever stand for presidential elections. The only thing about Hillary was that she was unlikeable. Otherwise, she had a good record as a Senator and a Secretary of State, and was a good enough politician that Bill Clinton wanted to marry her. She governed well and had a mastery of detail. Kamala Harris would struggle to explain to people why she ought to be president at all.

So when you compare Hillary to Kamala, you actually wouldn't expect Kamala to outperform Hillary. But Kamala actually underperformed Hillary by not very much. Hillary won the popular vote by a few percentage points. Kamala lost by 1 percent. Although Trump in 2024, remember, is also a weaker candidate than in 2016. Now, many more people know that he's a criminal, and know that he tried – rather desperately, one might add – to steal the 2020 election.

I think that's the reason why the criticism of Kamala was a bit more muted – people probably thought that she was so crap that they are surprised that she lost that narrowly to Trump.

There are a few things that will go against Kamala this time around. There are the things that were the holdovers from 2020 – that she made her hash of her first presidential run, that Biden had the nomination handed to him on a platter, that he then handed the VP nomination to her on a platter, and that they were never tested in a real presidential campaign because COVID made it impossible to have a conventional campaign.

On top of this, Biden also cheated by covering up his health issues from the public, not just as a candidate, but also as a president. It's bad enough to pretend that you're healthy and well to be a candidate, but it's probably even worse to pretend that you're well enough to be a president. Then who the hell was running the show?

And to top it all off, Kamala Harris was given an endorsement by Joe Biden right away, after Joe Biden said that he wasn't going to run. One of the more shocking revelations of this book is that it was Kamala who said to Joe Biden, “you have to endorse me immediately”, and he immediately complied. It's almost as though Joe Biden never prepared for the contingency that he was one day not going to run, until it was forced upon him, and didn't think through who was going to be the Democratic nominee. The only reason why I think he endorsed her was to keep the nomination “in the family”, and Biden considered Kamala Harris part of the family.

While Joe Biden is a solid president, there's no evidence that Kamala Harris would have been a good president, in hindsight. She mainly got her votes because there are more people this time around who know that Trump is incompetent, as opposed to in 2016, when it was easier to pretend that he was just acting crazy for show. Kamala Harris had a lot of endorsements early in the campaign, and there was a great initial wave of enthusiasm for her, as the person who didn't get as much hate as Trump got. But then later people got to know Kamala better and they started probing for who she really was, and they started to realise that she had done very little to deserve her nomination. That's when she started to lose those crucial votes that would have catapulted a Democrat into the White House.

It's also notable that Obama and Nancy Pelosi's preference was to have an open convention and redo the primary. But there were reasons why Kamala would have wanted to run. She might have thought that it was a fait accompli for her to be nominated and given that she was going to be nominated anyway, she had to have the endorsement from Biden right away. As opposed to that she was forcing him to make her the presidential nominee and actively shaping the course of events.

Another thing that counted against Kamala was that both Obama and Hillary recounted that they had to fight tough primary campaigns. Hillary had to fight two tough primary campaigns, whereas Biden and Kamala Harris had their nominations handed to them on a platter, that not ony was Biden's nomination essentially a coronation – he got the gay candidate (Buttegieg) and female candidates (Warren and Klobuchar) to step aside to led him run – the bye that he received extended to Kamala Harris too. They allowed him to run because the perception that Biden, as a white male was more electable than the rest. Then suddenly that opened the door for the black female to be shooed in. That looked a lot like Kamala Harris was the DEI hire. Fewer people considered Obama the DEI hire because he managed to prove himself by beating Hillary in 2008.

Presidential candidates are not annointed. They are given the opportunity to showcase their worth to on the world stage to millions of people watching in a primary. It's the primary which is the making of the candidate. It's through the primary process that great candidates like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are unearthed. The Democrats appeared to have an embarrassment of riches in 2008 when it seemed as though they had not one but two viable presidential candidates. But this bounty was squandered. It turns out that 2000 didn't unearth any great candidates – Al Gore was basically almost given the candidacy because he was picked as VP and didn't have to sell himself to the world, and this was disastrous for the Democrats to retain the White House. 2004 only unearthed John Kerry and John Edwards. John Edwards carried forth into 2008, and revelations about his infidelity basically disqualified him from running again. In 2012, there were no candidates unearthed because there was no primary – Obama was the presumptive nominee. In 2016, there were 2 presumptive nominees waiting, Hillary and Biden, and while Bernie Sanders was a very strong candidate, there are doubts about his suitability to be the president, due to his radicalism and his politics. In 2020, there was Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. But curiously enough, no great figure on the scale of an Obama.

2024 was supposed to be the year when there could have been candidates to put themselves forward. People talked about the amount of talent that was available, in people like Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz and Gavin Newsom. But none of them got the chance to showcase themselves on the world stage. And that was what was so damaging about what Biden had done. 2024 would have been a great time for younger people – the post Baby Boomers to put themselves forward for the president's job, to at least keep themselves in the public spotlight for 2028. And nobody picked up the mantle. Alexander Ocasio Cortez might be getting enough mileage to put herself forward in 2028, but we don't really know.

The silence around the Democratic Party has been deafening. There are people who openly doubt whether it's a good idea to be protesting Donald Trump since day 1. And Donald Trump has actually made it very hard for the protesters to be out in full force. The Democrats might take a chance that Donald Trump's own actions made Republicans even more toxic than before. But then they'll be accused of doing nothing during the nation's darkest hour.

It's very notable that this book has really been about more of Democrats than the Republicans. Most of the narrative in the clip has been about Democrats, and not very much actually has been about Republicans. Trump has nominated a firebrand as a VP, and I can't imagine JD Vance doing the same thing that Mike Pence did if another January 6 broke out. I don't know if the Harris campaign was actually thinking “we're not actually going to lose this, are we?” throughout the campaign.