Indonesian
voters are at the polls today (since it is the 9th in Indonesia). Campaigning is not allowed in the days
leading up to the election, and according to our men (and women) on the street,
all seems quiet. No one knows who will
win.
Indonesians
living abroad and more progressive Indonesians are by and large voting for Jokowi. Prabowo is a charismatic man who is
attracting the attention of younger voters who do not remember that he is
responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people and is considered by
many countries to be a war criminal.
He
also has been helped in his campaign by (and it makes me sick to report this)
US Public Relations professionals responsible for past Republican campaigns.
There’s
enough blame to go around, my friends, if he wins.
The Selling of Prabowo
Indonesia's
presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto gestures as he leaves a campaign rally
in Ciparay near Bandung, West Java (7/3). REUTERS/Stringer
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta
July 5,
2014
Rob Allyn, Prabowo Subianto’s American spin doctor, has
worked with politicians outside the United States before, not just in
Indonesia.
Allyn helped Mexico’s Vicente Fox win the country’s top job
in 2000. That year, Fox knocked off the Institutional Revolutionary Party,
which had been in power for 71 years.
In Indonesia today, where Prabowo is running for president
against Jakarta Governor Joko Widodo, Allyn has lined up with the candidate who
seems more deeply entwined with the establishment. Both the Golkar Party, which
dominated Indonesia for decades under the Suharto regime and the ruling
Democratic Party, have joined Prabowo’s coalition.
“I’m a businessman, not a politician,” Allyn told D
Magazine in 2001.
Mexico’s constitution prohibits outsiders from engaging with
the country’s "political affairs.” Hundreds of journalists and human
rights observers have been expelled under the law. But that didn’t stop Allyn.
“Attuned to sensitivities in Mexico over the involvement of
foreigners in the country's elections, Mr. Allyn traveled to Mexico under
pseudonyms like José de Murga and Alberto Aguirre to advise Mr. Fox on polling,
wardrobe and speeches,” Simon Romero wrote for The New York Times in
2005.
“Since then, Mr. Allyn has branched out to work on campaigns
in other countries. He counts among his clients the Golkar Party in Indonesia;
the prime minister of the Bahamas, Perry Christie; and, most recently,
Dumarsais Siméus, the Haitian-born Texas millionaire who aspires to be elected
president of Haiti.”
Allyn studied under Henry Kissinger at Georgetown, helped
George W. Bush become governor of Texas in 1994 and consults for large
corporations like Coca Cola.
He returned to work for Fox in 2005 to lobby for Mexico’s
interests in the United States - and assist Fox’s protege Felipe Calderon ahead
of the next election, according to Mexican media. (Calderon’s people claimed
they only ever spoke to Allyn informally.)
At the time, Calderon was billing himself as honest and
patriotic, but he wasn’t having much luck. So Calderon changed his tactics,
launching a series of attack ads against his main rival, the popular Mexico
City mayor Lopez Obrador. Calderon then surged in the polls.
Narco News, an online newspaper covering the drug
war from Latin America, described Allyn’s activities: “incendiary television
spots, falsified public opinion polls, and ‘reports’ based on rumor and innuendo,
to sow fear and loathing into the election campaign.”
Allyn never admitted to the link with Calderon. But for many
critics, the connection was clear enough. At the time, negative ads were “a new
phenomenon in Mexican democracy,” Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, director of the
Mexico Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in
2006. “There are fingerprints of US political electoral strategists all over
[the election] because it’s not something that has traditionally been used.”
Allyn is clearly a master of his craft. The D Magazine
article depicted him making his pitch to Fox, taking him and his staff through
a six-hour seminar on the history of political advertising. Fox was immediately
sold.
Allyn follows in the footsteps of Edward Bernays, widely
regarded as “the father of public relations.” Bernays also plied his trade
outside the United States. The United Fruit Company, for example, hired him to
direct a disinformation campaign against Jacobo Arbenz, the Guatemalan
president who tried to put through ambitious agrarian reforms in the 1950s.
Arbenz was labeled a communist, and the US government intervened to overthrow
him.
Joko too has been labeled a communist - not to mention a
secret Christian born of Chinese-Singaporean parents - in an Indonesian race
for president that has been marred by more smears than any other.
"It is very clear that this year's smear campaign
against Jokowi is unprecedented in post-Suharto elections," Marcus
Mietzner, a professor at Australian National University, told Tempo. "And
it is equally clear that it is modeled around Republican campaigns against
Democratic candidates in the US. Jokowi's depiction as a Singaporean and
Christian is a direct copy of Obama's portrayal as a Kenyan and Muslim in
2008."
Daniel Lund, an Obredor pollster, elaborated on the
consequences of spin doctors' actions in his country. “US political consultants
at their best produce mischief,” Lund explained. “They may know how to
manipulate media, but do they contribute to the good governance of a country,
to the democratic maturity of a nation? I would argue no.”
