Ranil does the bull Clinton again, but can he regain?
Was Ranil Wickremesinghe basking in the confetti or was he ducking from it?? He was meant to bask in the confetti, and to pretend that he was Bill Clinton. His handlers had probably told him to turn his hair to the light to make it shine against the strobes.

Wickremesinghe probably expected the kind of confetti he got on the day he married . But was he in for a surprise?? This confetti-shower fell in great dollops and in multiplying numbers, as if somebody had emptied the dust pan after sweeping the remnants of yesterday's Kotthu Roti off the tiles. But what to do? As Moragoda would have surely told him, you got to do it the way the Americans do it.

Human instinct is to duck and duck he did --- we can't blame him for that, though his body language shows that he was also having at least something of what the handlers said in his mind. So he was half eager for the large confetti and half blocking it with his elbows, as a result of which he ended up looking quite undecided.

All of this trumpets the predictable start to Ranil Wickremesinghe's election campaign. Our good friends in the Ravaya newspaper themselves are musing this week whether its really true that "Ranil can't"(Ranil ta be neda?)

Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict), if this slightly pious-minded digression is to be allowed, apparently referred to Buddhism as a "religion of autoerotic salvation.'' Let the Mahanayakes dissect that bit of comparative religion, but for our part we have to borrow this 'autoerotic' phrase to distinguish Ranil Wickremesinghe's election tactics from the rest of the Sri Lankan campaign scrum.

His party handlers and hucksters have been doing this for a long time now beginning from the occasion on which Ranil Wickremesinghe was told to say that he will 'replace betel with chewing gum' while gifting a gold chain each to every pubescent village lad whose voice had just cracked. Talk about autoerotic salvation. The only thing he was told not to wear for his last campaign gig for television from the opulent surroundings of Temple Trees, was a waistcoat and a top hat. He still wore the full regalia nevertheless, and in this Saville Row kind of outfit he sounded as if he was a ventriloquist's puppet for whom the words in Sinhala were being mouthed elsewhere by a handler doing the deep-throat behind a green door……

With all of this, Ranil Wickremesinghe did indeed win one election out of his last twelve outings, which brings us to the serious consideration of whether Wickremesinghe can regain this country's leadership -- even if he palpably could not regain Sri Lanka??

One gentleman with a fine mind told me recently that Wickremesinghe is not politically promiscuous like some of the others of the day, who try to grab every opportunity that arises by converting it into a vote catching fling with the people. He said "Wickremesinghe is a guy who plays the waiting game - - he will wait for the government to stew in its own juice. After they mess up he will step in as if by default.''

The gentleman is right upto a point - - all the messengers from Sri Kotha have told me before that Ranil Wickremesinghe's plan is to give this government a few years so that things will take an ugly turn, at which point he can enter and inherit the tattered and bloodied country.

While acknowledging that as far as strategies go this is also a strategy, it slightly smacks of the strategy of the 80-year-old millionaire who married the 18-year-old model. Asked about his plans for children, he pretended to run his fingers through his hearing aid and replied "when my lodger is ready, I'm eager'' while his wife let out only the slightest hint of a blush.

So what if the government is ultimately going to be responsible for it - - as long as Wickremesinghe can eventually start regaining the leadership?? It's a passive-partner strategy no doubt, but pro-active has not been the Wickremesinghe style of engagement - he is a default man -- oops, I almost said a man by default.

My sub-conscious mind swears to you that that was not Freudian in the least. Question is, is the UPFA government playing into the hands of his default strategy?? There were suggestions in some of the non mainstream media that the President is underperforming as she does not want anyone who inherits the leadership of her party to become president after her, as this will eclipse her profile entirely.

Things could in the end revert to a tug o' war between opposing forces as opposed to opposing parties. The pendulum that has fallen to the nationalist patriotic left of centre axis, is being tugged at by the neo-liberal free-market axis that swears by pluralism if not a policy of low-intensity LTTE tolerance. To frame it in different terms, it's the less globalised forces (read JVP, Amunugma and Gunadasa Amarasekera), versus the heavily globalised forces (read Tamilchelvam, Peter Harrold and Moragoda).

But, the latter forces are losing, considering their game plan of mimicry, which can be called Ranil Wickremesinghe's costume-party nationalism. Instead of capitalising on the pluralistic Sri Lankan identity and capturing more middle ground, Ranil is now trying to wear the nationalist hat which fits him as sloppily as an ample polka-dot bikini would fit his bottom. It explains why he is launching a Buddhist tome on Monday at the Gangaramaya, where Ranil will -- I bet my last rupee on it -- trade his blazer and tie for a more traditional something, even if he looks so uncomfortable in it that he might have to wear the same dodgy body language as he did on the day he ducked the confetti drizzle at Sri Kotha….

Tailpeice: A semi-retired scribe wrote from his pulpit on high last week about the departed Taraki. He said that 'obituary writers should give a thought to the dead man's wife and three children'' . Positively insulting it was, to dozens of scribes who did just that and initiated help for the family - weeks before this late order batsman woke up with his Rip Van Winklish delayed obit.

He says something about Taraki's blown cover. As they say, dead men tell no tales, but that spy story does sound rich. Next time he will say the Pope himself asked him to deliver that homily about the dead man's wife and kids!

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