If what Indonesia will get as its vice president was demonstrated in Friday night’s debate (Dec. 22), then the country’s economy could be in real danger.
None of the candidates possessed the basic logic of running the economy of a country, let alone a big and complex country like Indonesia, with each of them being out of their depth, disregarding basic concepts of scarcity, as well as costs versus benefits axioms. Any first year college student who reads Lipsey or Samuelson can argue better than them.
But then again, considering its importance, economy should have been a topic for a presidential debate, not a vice president, who in practice will not make economic policies unless the president passes away, or in an emergency situation. Thus, it is incomprehensible that such a crucial issue, like the economy, was degraded to a vice presidential level debate in the first place, a decision that positioned one candidate better than the others. In fact, James Carville summed it best the importance of economic suffering of people for the election of Bill Clinton as the US president in 1992, defeating incumbent George H.W. Bus, with a mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
We’re not expecting an economist level of mastery from the candidates but at least having a working knowledge of how the economy of a country works. But the fact that both Muhaimin Iskandar, Anies Baswedan’s running mate, and Mahfud MD of Ganjar Pranowo’s team were outplayed and outcoached by Prabowo’s running-mate Gibran Rakabuming Raka, who is actually a pretender – if not a straight up phony – is maddening.
It’s not because Gibran, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s son, was that smart, or showed understanding of economics principles. An underdog, he really just followed the script prepared by his team of coaches while copying what his father did when winning the last two elections. All he had to do was memorise, read notes and recite.
Gibran’s strategy was just throwing out as many seemingly sophisticated jargons and acronyms as possible in the hope that they would confuse old schools like the two other candidates. And for a senior politician like Muhaimin, who already stopped reading a long time ago and was busy with politicking, and a legal expert like Mahfud, who is already a professor of law, and was expected to know everything.
Economics is specific and technical, and full of specific concepts – just like law, politics and accounting and any other fields. If you know, you know, and if you don’t there is no way around it.
Thus, Gibran just had to drop jargon like carbon capture and storage (CCS), or downstreaming and digital downstreaming, or uttering acronyms, such as ICOR (Incremental Capital Output Ratio) or SGIE (State of Global Islamic Economy) when asking Mahfud and Muhaimin, without any obligation to explain them himself, or being checked or punished for such irresponsible snobbism. In a real intellectual exercise and debate, he would have been killed for this concept dropping.
While all of these concepts are actually quite complex, and can’t be explained in even one semester course – let alone in one-minute answer in a debate, it is unnecessary to bring up these technical terms during such a high-level debate, which should have been about vision and strategy to achieve economic goals, or to increase and equally distribute prosperity among people across the nation. These concepts are useless in tackling these challenges. .
Besides, many of these concepts are problematic. There have been intense debates, for instance, about the effectiveness of CCS with environmentalists criticising it as another way of monetising the environment – not destroying the environment to serve some rich people is the key to conserving it. Meanwhile Jokowi’s push for downstreaming has been accused of benefiting business people within his circle, while providing China with a free pass to do whatever it wants and feeding natural-resource hungry Asia giant for its economic development.
The second script is to combine those jargons and acronyms to Jokowi’s signature projects and programs to send a signal to the public that he understood what he was talking about, and has the level of sophistication beyond the two old guards.
The third scenario is to mimic Jokowi’s expression and cheap tactic of introducing little known acronyms to show how knowledgeable he is while at the same time to humiliate the opponent, such as when Gibran hit Muhaimin with SGIE, seemingly forcing the nervous latter to admit he did not know the acronym and behave awkwardly.
Here we could see how unprepared and overrated Muhaimin has been.
Had Muhaimin and his team studied the history – well, not really a history, it’s just the most recent presidential election debates in 2014 and 2019 involving Jokowi – then they should have been cautious and aware that Jokowi’s tactic would be use by his son, especially throwing out little known but pre-memorised acronyms, and prepared a way to overcome this. But it seems that Muhaimin’s coach, Thomas Lembong, a Harvard graduate and well-respected technocrat, was either too over confident in Muhaimin’s capability or too naive leading them to have a good faith that such a cheap tactic would not have been repeated.
But it seems that you could never be too cautious when facing Jokowi and his son. You should have always expected for the worst.
Another possibility was that Muhaimin and Mahfud did not give enough respect to the debate and their opponent, Gibran. They downplayed both the debate and Gibran, resulting in failing to prepare adequately, believing that in the worst situation they could use their tested public speaking ability to hide their lack of knowledge.
Either way, they were punished and humiliated for their overconfidence and laziness.
If both Muhaimin and Mahfud have enough wisdom and humility – qualities a good leader must have – they should have just admitted upright that they had not heard such complex but irrelevant jargons and acronyms, throwing them back to Gibran and confronting him to explain them himself.
And if they were smart enough and had enough logic they could tell Gibran and the audience that such jargons and acronyms were too technical and had little relevance in dealing with an economy as big as Indonesia.
Or, if they had a gut, they could have told Gibran: “Mas Gibran, Mas Gibran! Why use cheap tactics like what your old man already did? We know you just want to trick us with such jargon. Sorry ye, sorry ye, we don’t want to play along”.
In fact, many of us – if not, most of us – have been fed up and tired with such a flood of jargon. After all, in Jokowi’s 10 years reign, we’ve all been fed with media acts, jargons and gimmicks. And for Gibran, we have to give him an Oscar as a proper award for his act as Jokowi 4.0.
At the same time, this is a check against the Anies and Ganjar team. The gains they had on Prabowo in the previous presidential debate could quickly evaporate by a mere tiny misstep and miscalculation.
