Just managed to catch on tv the PM at his quite short closing address at the 2010 UMNO GA in PWTC. Of course"short" is relative, but seeing that this is in fact the 4th. day of the deliberations and the tons of bombast that must have been sprayed in the Merdeka Hall and splashed on newspages with the usual journalistic spin , short was refreshing.
At times dead serious and other times quite ribald, Najib was on familiar territory, and the audiance seemed to have given him fair hearing in spite of the yawns picked by the cameras. The centre of his message was simple. He is asking for the Malays to appreciate the "great things" that UMNO have done in the last 6 decades and to show this appreciation by returning UMNO to power in all future elections because only UMNO can deliver while its detractors can only offer rethoric.
Having attended many of these conventions in the past, I know that there were surely plenty of speakers from both ends of the quality spectrum, and much more in between. That, I can assure you, is one area where UMNO lacks little.
I remember Najib , when he was a junior Minister, was not shy of using some Bengali phrases to add punch to his speech, as others used their Islamic knowledge fully to embellish their lengthy discourses with strategically placed Arabic quotations. This time around even the non-Islamic educated Youth leader liberaly injected intellectual-sounding but opaque Arabic words into his prose when in fact more limpid sounding Malay words carrying the exact same meaning were available. So much for bombast.
The truth of the matter is, talk is cheap. Results matter, and in the last two years many results face the so-called "Malay agenda" right in the face. Only time, and there isn't too much of it left, will tell whether all this talk can regain the lost electoral votes, resolve the unfulfilled social promises, and in general remedy the lingering public malaise somehow sensed by the bigger majority of the Malays. And that is not even beginning to talk about racial issues.
What is certain, though, is the fact that the opportunists among the top UMNO leadership must be culled, and quickly. They are easy enough to identify. If they are not quickly removed from position of influence, the rakyat may well make their feelings known in the next GE. They have done that in 2008. They can do it again. No idle talk here.
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