EDITORIAL - If Crawford could stay on message

The problem with Damion Crawford is his vocal narcissism - his love affair with his voice and the echo of his alliterations.

So, even when he is being sensible, he gets carried away and says something patently stupid. Which was the case with his "dutty Labourite" comment on Sunday, for which he was forced into another public apology.

Sunday's sophomoric lapse drew attention from the larger issues covered by his speech, to do with conduct of politics, values and attitudes, and family life, that, fortuitously, are currently on the minds of two other prominent Jamaicans, the former prime minister, P.J. Patterson, and the businessman, Sameer Younis.

Two decades ago, when he was still the country's leader and Jamaica's social dysfunction was already well advanced, Mr Patterson launched his Values and Attitudes Campaign, an attempt at a national discourse in which he hoped to lead a softer and gentler Jamaica.

Mr Patterson was ridiculed by the cynics and the campaign soon foundered. Jamaica is the worse for it.

Twenty years on, Mr Patterson, in a speech to the Rotary Club of Spanish Town, had cause to lament "a massive increase in crime and violence, rampant drug warfare, the spread of urban blight" and the fact that "ethical standards have fallen precipitously".

Elsewhere, Mr Younis, speaking to young people graduating from a leadership-training programme, was ruing the "breakdown of family life", which helps to breed "petty crimes, among the other social ills we face daily in the society".

Mr Crawford, the relatively young junior tourism minister, is an MP for the People's National Party (PNP), which Mr Patterson used to lead. Unlike the deliberate Mr Patterson, he speaks in the cadences of youth and, often, ideology of the populist.

On Sunday, until that giddy step over the partisan precipice, he challenged existing precepts of political support, the "plyboard and zinc PNP" , which are metaphors for the conditions under which many people who vote for Jamaican parties cast their ballots, in expectation that they will get a specific benefit in return. In Mr Patterson's time, it was called "scarce benefits and spoils".

POLITICAL CLIENTELISM

Implied in Mr Crawford's analysis was that this kind of transactional politics derogates from a higher order of governance and relieves people of personal responsibility, as in the case of parents who pay no attention to the performance of their children in school, or bear children without thought to the consequence. And the clientelism that it breeds is the foundation upon which parties fashioned the zones of political exclusion, the garrison communities, over which they have lost much of their control.

Drawing attention to these problems is one thing, how we go about extricating ourselves from them is quite another. Mr Patterson, as part of his suggestion of broader conversation on the matter, identified at least one practical action that, as an elder statesman of the PNP, he can pursue with the fervour that was lacking when he was its president.

"The absence of a criminal charge or acquittal from a crime of moral turpitude cannot be a yardstick by which political parties and the electorate measure the suitability of those who seek political office," Mr Patterson said. He is right.

But for his proneness to narcissistic stumbles, Damion Crawford might have been useful in helping Mr Patterson in carrying the message.

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