Something's happening on the way to President's House
Ranil Wickremesinghe has made himself more electable. But as someone piped-up recently, electable does not mean elected. Yet, one of these candidates has to eat crow on the 18th. That's almost unimaginable -- that any of these would have to be humbled after both have been made larger than life during the last two months of fevered and garrulous stumping.

Rajapakse would be the first endorsement -- if elected -- that this is a Sinhala Buddhist nation, stubbornly and eccentrically so. If he is President on the 18th, his kurrakan shawl will be a real red flag for all the secularists and the multi ethnicists of this country. But, at least the lines will be firmly drawn. The sentiments of large segments of this country's populations would be so clear, that on the one hand it might strengthen the case for separatism.

On the other, it might weaken it. It could seem that the Sinhalese were right to fight back when the north and eastern rebels rose against them. They are a fiercely tribal people, who as a Rajapakse victory would confirm, had an enormous unassailable sense of collective identity. The international community will be put on notice of this, and this notice will be in their face.

Wickremesinghe says all this is tosh. Maybe that's why in the last days of his campaign he seems to have induced a sore throat to lend his voice a macho edge. His gesticulation, weird in the past few months, seems finally to synchronize with his voice. His campaign, to boot, seems finally to synchronize with his sentiments.

Analysts and analyst-pretenders act as if they do not see it. But Wickremesinghe has strategically split the Mahinda Rajapakse campaign exactly in two, not without considerable help from the outgoing President.

You can forget the numbers, but at least psychologically, exactly one half of the anti-UNP forces are subtly pulling for a national government with Wickremesinghe as President, and Kumaratunga as Prime Minister.
The government newspapers are pulling one half for Wickremesinghe and one half for Rajapakse, and Kumaratunga last week instructed the state television to do likewise, something unprecedented in recent times.
Politically, that would have meant that Rajapakse is stone dead. He is incumbent Prime Minister, running against the burden of incumbency and the unpopularity brought along with it. He is running against almost all of the minorities barring the odd renegade rumps scattered on the borders.

But yet, no one has been willing to write his political obituary. That speaks volumes for his political stature, and his faith in the fact that Wickremesinghe is a candidate because somebody has to get beat in this election --- and Wickremesinghe is the caricature of that born loser.

That makes this the election of the loser against the loser -- Wickremesinghe the perennial loser against Rajapakse the giant loser - the man who committed political suicide with alliances that pushed his own party and President to secretly prefer a national government to a government of their own.

Yet, in the collective public psyche, both have been primed to win, which makes all of it in the final analysis very bizarre. Both losers have been made to look so much like winners that it's hard for the public to visualize exactly who will lose in what's less than a fortnight to go before we bite the ballot….

Privately, some SLFP diehards have resurrected Wickremesinghe in their minds and Wickremesinghe is using his image as the achiever of improbable success - the maligned ceasefire -- to say he will have one more improbable success, a national government with an ex-President holding office. He is sprouting more grey hairs almost to prove that he is the wizard; the smiling assassin.

Against this, there is the almost comic comeback. Mangala Samaraweera is the coat-and-tie of Mahinda Rajapakse's nationally dressed, kurrakan adorned Sinhala Buddhist campaign. Mangala provides the necessary thuppahi element of a political campaign which wanted some "thuppahi'' flavour -- some interracial and interfaith appeal -- in a multi cultural society. (See last week's column in my space.)
But Mangala is doing the thuppahi to the point of a Mariyakade Sophie impression. If he were a cross-dresser, this metaphor would have fit Mangala like a sanitary napkin fitting a sex-changed Thai tart.

Anyway, the fact is that Mangala is taking Mahinda Rajapakse's fierce and proud sense of nationalism, turning the tables on it and making his campaign look ragtag as a brass band at a Negombo funeral.

That's dissonance. It is also so much unnecessary noise, such as Thalatha Athukorale's superb comeback on Mangala Samaraweera's trumped-up tale about Gamini Athukorale being murdered by Ranil. Rajapakse needs this kind of thing like he needs a rash on his face.
Campaigns, and particularly electronic media campaigns have their moments of tragi-comedy and farce, but to a great extent last week's scenario of Ranil's national government rhetoric and the thuppahification a la Mangala of Mahinda's campaign, draw a micro-picture representative of the larger contours of the 2005 presidential race.

It is one that pits in terms of rhetoric, a nationalist (Mahinda) against a near alien.(Ranil.) But it has been impossible to paint the election in those terms only, even though it would have been easier for the Mahinda campaign to polarize the poll to make it totally black and white on such lines. Reality has however intruded. It has been impossible to keep out the naked political element -- hence the mud slinging and the brittleness of the Mahinda coalition, which drew the induced response of "national government'' from Ranil, something Chandrika Kumaratunga is deftly playing with.

Mahinda has fought back politically, by deploying Samaraweera to regain the coat-and-tie of his campaign, that boggy middle ground.
But Samaraweera in the process has exposed the impurities of Mahinda nationalism. He has laid bare the fact that Rajapakse has pragmatic considerations and not merely romanticized ones of nation state and suzerainty. By exposing that stain on the Mahinda aura, Mangala revealed the Mahinda campaign as being common and real, not exclusive and high-minded. Now, Ranil and Mahinda are even. Plus, it seems Ranil has the minorities on his side.

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