To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

?This is the sea­son of the screen­ing of can­di­dates by po­lit­i­cal par­ties dur­ing which the gen­er­al will of the con­stituen­cy ex­ec­u­tive is pit­ted against the pow­er ex­er­cised by po­lit­i­cal lead­ers and par­ty oli­garchies as to who will best rep­re­sent the in­ter­ests of the par­ties at the polls and there­after.

In the ma­jor­i­ty of the in­stances, the con­stituen­cy ex­ec­u­tive has its way and its can­di­date of choice is se­lect­ed af­ter a short process of an­swer­ing ques­tions (which hard­ly amounts to a thor­ough prob­ing) posed by the screen­ing com­mit­tee, made up of the par­ty hi­er­ar­chy, head­ed by the po­lit­i­cal leader. In such in­stances it is re­al­ly a mat­ter of con­firm­ing some­one who has been agreed to by all be­fore hand. It is how­ev­er when the po­lit­i­cal lead­er­ship, read po­lit­i­cal leader, has a prob­lem with the pro­posed can­di­date–for one rea­son or the oth­er, some­times per­son­al, or has a favourite he/she wants to in­stall, most of the times in a "safe" seat–that the con­flict aris­es. From Williams to Man­ning, and now from Pan­day to Per­sad-Bisses­sar, the con­flict has arisen and will arise. As is al­ways tout­ed, the con­sti­tu­tions of the par­ties are the fi­nal ar­biters. In all par­ties, the con­sti­tu­tion gives the po­lit­i­cal leader the right to have the fi­nal say. Mr Pan­day al­ways ex­er­cised that au­thor­i­ty ruth­less­ly, not al­low­ing for dis­sent to pre­vent him from mak­ing his own se­lec­tion. So too has Mr Man­ning held forth, squar­ing off against con­stituen­cy ex­ec­u­tives and re­fus­ing to budge from his po­si­tion of choice.

As could be ex­pect­ed in the quest for pow­er by the par­ties, the ex­ec­u­tives usu­al­ly even­tu­al­ly fall in line and al­low their lead­ers the last word. In the cel­e­brat­ed in­ci­dent of this type, Dr Williams, in the face of the po­ten­tial for open in­ter­nal con­flict on the eve of the 1976 elec­tion, backed down and al­lowed those he deemed "mill­stones around my neck" to be can­di­dates. He how­ev­er rel­e­gat­ed the five to the back­bench­es hav­ing won a hand­some elec­toral vic­to­ry. From the re­ports so far, Mr Man­ning must have adopt­ed a sim­i­lar strat­e­gy and tem­po­rary truce in the case of Dr Kei­th Row­ley: he clear­ly un­der­stands the val­ue of Row­ley on the cam­paign plat­form. Per­haps of even greater sig­nif­i­cance, the Prime Min­is­ter knows that go­ing against the over­whelm­ing choice of the Diego Mar­tin West con­stituen­cy could trig­ger the type of in­ter­nal con­vul­sions from which he and the PNM would not be able to emerge suc­cess­ful­ly.

But al­so go­ing on re­ports so far avail­able, Mr Man­ning be­lieves he and the par­ty will not en­counter the same lev­el of con­flict if he ig­nores the ap­par­ent pop­u­lar choice of the Ari­ma con­stituen­cy in the in­stance of Pen­ne­lope Beck­les and makes his own se­lec­tion, Lau­rel Leza­ma. With the UNC/COP screen­ing not be­ing as ad­vanced as the PNM, such head-on con­flicts have not arisen just yet. But they are sure to with the likes of Kelvin Ram­nath, Ramesh Ma­haraj and oth­ers from the dis­si­dent team seek­ing to get the nod from the UNC's screen­ing com­mit­tee, as­sum­ing they are able to get con­stituen­cy sup­port. And this does not even be­gin to con­sid­er the con­flicts like­ly over the COP's at­tempt to get eq­ui­ty in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of con­stituen­cies.

One ma­jor dif­fi­cul­ty with the process of the con­sti­tu­tions of the par­ties is that it does not al­low for in­tel­li­gent and ra­tio­nal dis­cus­sion be­tween the con­stituen­cy ex­ec­u­tives and the po­lit­i­cal lead­er­ship, the for­mer hav­ing to sub­mit to the de­sires of the lat­ter with­out dis­course. The Amer­i­can sys­tem is far more de­mo­c­ra­t­ic as can­di­date se­lec­tion is the pre­serve of the elec­tors in pri­maries and this is from pres­i­den­tial through con­gres­sion­al and sen­a­to­r­i­al nom­i­nees; peo­ple have the say and they do so in vig­or­ous cam­paigns. Whether we go that route or not, the present arrange­ment mere­ly en­trench­es the sys­tem of to­tal con­trol by one in­di­vid­ual.