A month ago, I made a bet with my friend on the prospect of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) and Jusuf Kalla (JK) duet. My friend, having believed that SBY-JK duet for the last 5 years was a success, insisted that SBY will eventually choose Kalla as his running mate. Just two weeks ago, I claimed my victory as Kalla picked Wiranto as his running mate.

After a decent dinner (where he paid me for our bet), we chatted all night long about Indonesia’s politics. It was such a lively chat we had. We disagree on almost every matter; except one—we agreed that Indonesia’s politics is getting more and more similar to what Indonesians call as sinetron (soap opera).

To see how our politics have become more melodramatic than ever before, we can simply take a look at the latest development of it. Surely there were a lot of surprising moves in the last five days.

The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) flirted with Democrat Party, leaving the public gapped to see how easy it is for their political parties to change its course and lost its consistency as an opposition.
Another maneuver was taken by SBY who has finally decided his running mate, Boediono, a well-known economist and the governor of the central bank—and more importantly, an independent with no party affiliation.

It turns out that this maneuver has led us into another scene of our political drama. An angry voice came up from the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) who threatened to leave the coalition if SBY keeps Boediono as his vice president nominee.

PKS vice secretary general angrily saying that SBY did not have an appropriate manner when it comes to political communication with his own coalition bloc. This, again, leaves the public amazed on how immature our politics has become.

Some might call this a political dynamics; I prefer to call this political drama.

Dynamism is a good thing when it comes to politics, but what we’ve seen in the last two weeks is not dynamism. It is simply pragmatism—plus a bit of political immaturity.

For me, seeing parties changing course that easily is an obvious example of how our politics lack of value. Too many parties in a system make it more difficult to hold on to certain ideology. When all parties become a catch-all party, that is a time when our politics will lost its value.

It seems to me that party’s platform is nothing more than just a slogan embedded in their headquarters lobby. They can easily hop on-and-off to another coalition or party blocs without having to consider their ideologies, platforms or programs. Any political moves taken by our political parties seem to be more of an impulsive action rather than strategic moves based on their party’s platforms.

This has also clearly shows us that our politics is all about power—well, it is always about power—but what I’m trying to say here is that when a party can easily shift to the center, left or right, they have forgotten their platforms to a point where they are just looking for a bigger part of the pie, and not thinking about the noble task beyond it.

When they have forgotten their own party platforms or programs, what can they offer to the people? Aren’t those two is the most important things in a political campaign? If that is the case, then this might be an explanation on how come we never heard of any platforms or programs debate to be put front-and-center on every campaign.

Sure they put a small fraction of time on it, but the biggest proportions of any campaign are dangdut performance and t-shirts throwing time. These two are the things that they offer to the people. In Indonesia, parties programs or ideology is not as effective as dangdut and t-shirt.

Why bother to give them any explanation on your party’s programs or public debate about it when you can just put a well-known singer or comedian as your legislative nominee? This has proven to be the best way to gain more mass without having to think about any complicated solution to our nation’s most pressing problems.

Clearly this is not a good example on how politics should run. This is not a good show to watch and more importantly, this is not a good civic or political education for the people.

Talking about sinetron, they only need a play with strong-imaging and stereotypical characters on it, exaggerated emotions, and sensational storyline, right? Aren’t that our politics have become? ***

This article was published on today’s Jakarta Globes “The Thinker” column. You can find it here.

By: Andika Putraditama

Three days ago there was something interesting on my Facebook news feed: a message from Facebook Site Governance asking me to join the group and cast my vote on two documents, the Facebook Principles and the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibility.

Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of this phenomenal social networking site, thinks the population of the “Facebook Nation” has grown so big that it needs more open and transparent governance. With a population of more than 200 million netizens worldwide, Facebook would be the fifth largest country in the world.

To take a step closer to the Democratic State of Facebook (as I’m calling it now), Zuckerberg proposed a more democratic approach to govern the Web site. He introduced the two aforementioned documents and let the netizens make comments, recommendations and proposals to alter them, then redrafted each and let users vote on a soon-to-be “Facebook Constitution.”

I really wish our own democracy could be that simple and effective.

But here’s a switch: We spend more and more money on our system, but we get nothing except violence, stagnancy and those eye-poking posters of the candidates all over our streets. I think it fair to say that these are the accurate snapshots of our democratic practices today.

Challenged by the present condition of our democracy, we might want to ask whether the current architecture of our democracy is just hideous or if it there is something real in it that we can pin our hopes on.

Our current system of direct elections seems to reduce the dominance of the power elite so that today everyone can join the hype and be a candidate. Consequently, now we have legislative candidates from literally any background — from a parking man to a media mogul. Even a criminal with a written record of smuggling weed joined the competition. If that counts, then “various backgrounds” will have a whole new meaning for our democracy.

These might be good examples of how participatory democracy is practiced in Indonesia, but the downside of having too many doors open in our system is that we can no longer have a credible quality control to filter our candidates.

Many, if not most, of the legislative candidates were inexperienced, lacked basic knowledge of legislative activities or were simply uneducated. Today we have quite a number of candidates that come from nonpolitical backgrounds, including those who are still very young and many more who are entertainers and comedians with no experience in politics.

Sure, they are full of ideals and fresh ideas, but real politics needs more than just ideals and ideas. Our democracy should not be the big and expensive joke we’ve seen in the last four months.

What awaits election winners in the next four years is noble yet delicate work. It requires no less than legal drafting ability, an understanding of how our political system works and a comprehensive grasp of the issues waiting to be resolved. Will they be able to perform well in the next four years? I doubt it.

Today’s elected legislators are the product of a troubled society. Those who nominate themselves without knowing what the job is all about and those who chose to vote for candidates they barely know — it’s like a blind date. The result is likely to be troublesome.

Consider this too: The people who spent millions or even billions of rupiah to put their faces on those corny political posters are the same people who will control our legislatures for the next four years. I simply cannot trust them to handle this enormous responsibility while the thought front and center in their minds must be on first recovering their campaign expenses in any way possible.

If one thinks that our recent legislative elections were a total disaster, then something has to be changed. But can we do that when our law-making process soon will be in the hands of the product of a troubled democracy?

This is not an overly pessimistic view or an attempt to underestimate those who will soon be legislators. This is a wake-up call for anyone out there who still believes in a better way to practice democracy. Even Facebook has a better way to run its democracy. Why can’t we fix ours? ***

Noo…it’s not the TV show…this is ‘the other’ reality show that we’ve seen a lot in the past months.

Aren’t you curious about what happen with the candidates who have lost the race? Well, here they are…living their happy life by buying an empty island and set up a “Dropped-Out-Candidates” club. Kinda pathetic, huh?

I got this funny political cartoon from TIME’s cartoon-of-the-week. And out of nowhere, a question suddenly came up to me. After they lost their candidacy, what will happen with the rest of the money? Can the candidates keep the rest of the campaign money? If it’s a yes, then buy an island and set up a club like the one in the picture is an option for them, isn’t it? Maybe they could run a travel agency together with the upcoming dropped-out, Hillary and the rest of the Republican candidates…*oops…I revealed my candidate…*

Enough the prologue…so, just out of curiosity, I tried to googled how much money left in the lost-candidates pocket now. You can also check it here.

The first former candidate is Mitt Romney. He raised almost $88.5 million in this race. But poor Romney got $35 million from his own pocket. So I think he’s out of our topic, he got no money left, in fact he’s in debt for $35 million.

What about Giuliani? He managed to raise almost $61 million and “only” spent $48 million before he dropped out of the race. His debt is about $1.2 million and no money from his own pocket. So we can assume that he now have $12 million left from his campaign. Same thing happen with Christopher Dodd (D), Fred Thompson (R) and Bill Richardson (D), although the amount of the money is far away from Giuliani’s cash-on-hand.

Now the remaining question would be: what will happen with this unused money? Can the candidates keep it? Or does it go into the party’s bank account?

After another Googling session, I found out that before 1993, candidates could and did keep unused campaign contributions. Unused campaign funds often transferred into candidate’s personal account. But they also have the freedom to spend it in other ways such as spend it as a contribution for their party or even support other candidate’s campaign.

They can also spend it by donating the money to a nonprofit charity, such as foundation headed by relatives or friends, forming a public agency and funnel the money to it, or even put the money to companies he controls.

Legally speaking, according to Federal Election Commission, there are three options for the candidates who still have unused campaign money. Here it is:

• The candidate is allowed to retain his money for a future election,
• The candidate can donate the money to a non-profit organization of his choosing as long as it has 501 (C) tax status,
• The candidate can donate his money to other campaign committees.

So, even though there is no hope of winning, why some of them keep stay in the race? Why go through all the trouble? I think now we know why….

With a fresh $12 million in your hand, losing an election is not that painful, huh?