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Published on August 30, 2007

The roundabout, polite answer is that they aren't quite ready for the fresh excitement. The real reason is because the next election won't be about substance; the name of the game will be for parties to get those votes, at all costs.

It's the party's "owner" who counts. The party's leader will only be a figurehead - an "image booster" perhaps, but he won't have a say in anything that's of any significance.

These "wise men" also know that if they were to accept the offers to lead political groupings, they would become part of either a weak coalition government, or a hopelessly impotent opposition party. You don't have to be a highly experienced political pundit to foresee a period of great volatility in the domestic political landscape after the next election.

Obviously, no matter how good an image these academics possess, or how desperate they are to find a meaningful political role to play, the ones with alert minds would certainly decide here and now not to be caught in a position whereby politics is dictated by "party owners" who spend most of their time wheeling and dealing, making compromises, proposing trade-offs and initiating horse-trading deals.

If they were really intent upon "doing no evil" (as the founders of Google pledged), these "enlightened minds" would not want to be trapped in a coalition government in which conflicts of interest and dividing up the political spoils - and certainly not serious political reforms or corruption busting - would be the order of the day.

Would anyone who prides himself on having a reasonably clean public record want to be seen as part of a political deal he couldn't even tell his wife about, or know what to say when his children question him on what they've read in the press?

Worse, they would have to be dragged into such unpleasant areas as "hybrid politics", which carries the highly embarrassing connotation of one being forced to sleep with strange, and at times despicable, partners whose notoriety they couldn't possibly, in their right minds, defend with any conviction.

If the prospect of "hybrid politics" would send chills down the spine of any respectable academic and politician, the term "political copulation", which the local newspapers have been using with almost no sense of shame among the parties' "owners", would certainly be the straw that broke the camel's back - at least for those who still expect society to treat them with any measure of respect.

If those potentially damaging prospects weren't enough to deter them from jumping onto the bandwagon, these "few good men" would surely wince at the possibility of being labelled "nominees" for politicians with outright corrupt and shady backgrounds. They realise that as "nominees" they run the high risk of their good names being dragged through the mud.

The "chosen few" also know that they would be going against the public's confidence, if not the law itself, by fronting for politicians who have been found guilty by the Constitution Tribunal of having bribed other parties to act as "nominees" in the last election.

The term "nominee" in fact smells rather fishy itself - especially after a veteran politician publicly used that label to describe his role in acting on behalf of a former prime minister in self-imposed exile. To be acting as a corrupt politician's "proxy" in the next election, which promises to be tainted with vote-buying and ballot-box manipulation, would be to confirm the worst suspicions of a wary public that those "few good men" may in fact be nothing more than a group of spineless, gullible, opportunists.

Dirty politics is back. Long live electioneers and all their front-men, henchmen and sidekicks!

Suthichai Yoon