So many things to blog about. Where shall I start?PJ is an NUS student who recently interviewed me for her thesis. Among many other questions, she asked me if I would ever enter politics. I laughed and said no.
One reason I gave is that entering politics means you have to be partisan. Once the party has decided on a particular stance on a key issue, you have to abide by it (publicly, at least). Internally you can bicker and argue, but to the public, party members must present a consistent, unified position. That's in the interest of the party.
This is very unappealing to me. I prefer to be true to myself.
Recently, the PAP had a leak (or so it would appear). Someone - and the best guess is that it must have been an insider - leaked some info to the press, which placed the PAP in a most embarrassing position. Serious damage has been done to a key item on the PAP's agenda - their cyberspace communication strategy.
And lest anyone be in doubt, the PAP's cyberspace communication strategy is definitely a key item on their agenda. Otherwise PM Lee wouldn't have talked so much about the Internet in his National Day Rally Speech last year. And the PAP wouldn't have placed a heavyweight minister like Dr Ng Eng Hen as chairman of their "New Media" committee.
How did the Great Leak happen? We don't know for sure, but my guess is that the "leaker" was someone in the PAP. It could have been a member of the rank and file - who disagreed in principle with the "anonymous poster" tactics that the PAP had decided to employ. He felt so strongly about it that he decided to do a very non-partisan thing - secretly tell the Straits Times about it.
And now, we might also guess that there will be a hunt through the party ranks, to find out the person behind the Great Leak. Of course, even assuming that they do find him, dealing with him may be a delicate matter. Firstly, there may be other members who also disagreed with the "anonymous poster" tactics. Secondly, the squealer is unfairly treated, he will be tempted to make new, even louder squeals to the press.
We mustn't presume that every PAP member really has that much to lose, if the party severely reprimands him. Or that every PAP member even wants to be a member forever. Don't forget people like Chia Ti Lik - who left the Young PAP to join the Workers' Party and run in the 2006 Elections.
On a separate point, it's now Day Six since the Great Leak, and we note that the P65 bloggers are still completely silent on the matter. The P65 Blog was conceived as a key PAP tool in communicating with the public in cyberspace, and one might expect that the P65 Blog would be the very first place where the PAP would respond to the story of the Great Leak.
Well, it appears that this expectation is wrong. Maybe the Great Leak has made the P65 bloggers speechless and they just don't know what to say. Maybe they're still working out their next corporate communications step. Or maybe they have decided to stay absolutely silent and hope that this thing will blow over and be forgotten.
If so, then they will learn that the blogosphere does not forget so easily. Unlike yesterday's newspapers, every blog post stays online forever unless the blogger decides to delete them. Years from now, whenever it's relevant to bring it up again, all it takes is a hyperlink to remind readers of the story of the Great Leak.