Even though PPP clearly won the election, I am wondering do you really think Samak is a suitable person for PM ?

It depends on what you mean by “suitable”. Given the options available to PPP then he is the most suitable person available to be PPP. Is he my favourite or first choice? Not really. I have neutral feelings about Samak. Chaturon would be my preferred PPP person, but well he is one of the 111 so no can do.

PPP don’t really have anyone else who is that experienced. Mingkwan looks good on paper, but he is untested and has no political experience. Samak is no political fool. Thaksin knows that from the time they didn’t see eye-to-eye in the mid 90s. PPP need some experience so Samak is a suitable person to lead in the circumstances.

They are hardly going to go with Banharn (even that recent poll with Abhisit leading in popularity stakes 51% vs 40% for Samak had Banharn at only 9%) and Suvit was a possibility, but ain’t an option now. Gen. Chetta has health problems. And well Snoh is Snoh. change. Samak will not be a one man show either. You and I both know he won’t dominate policy. As an oratorial figurehead he is ok. Samak will have to tone down his rhetoric to survive. If he doesn’t PPP he will go. So it depends on whether he wants it enough to be civil.

BTW, which party were Prem & Surayud standing for in the election?

Which party was Thaksin standing?

Grasshopper: I guess that makes me a “cheap cosmopolitan” too. I am unaccountably happy about the outcome(s) of this election… so far. This, in spite of the fact that, as a western liberal, I don’t really see myself “supporting” anyone in a Thai election. I responded to Adam Carr’s original post because I’m interested in the problematics of my having “western liberal eyes”, albeit focussed quite differently from Mr Carr’s, and therefore in need of corrective lenses to see well in the Thailand that I live in.

BTW, which party were Prem & Surayud standing for in the election?

I objected to the “cheap” way a western democrat could ask: who ought a western democrat support in the Thai election? As though western democrats emersed culturally in cosmopolitanism are in anyway able to be on one side or the other. As though being a liberal democrat enables one to be part of a universal club. The main thing for us cheap cosmopolitans is that democracy is back in Thailand.

Well said, indeed.

As opposed to the “ignorance of his (Samak’s) career” evinced in recent media and blogs, Suriyon’s knowing characterization of Samak as “a bright guy, and one of the finest orators in Thai politics for decades” is both “constructive” and “enlightening”.

Mr. Carr asked an apparently faux naif question about whom a progressive liberal westerner should support in this election and Suriyon “constructed” a thumbnail portrait of Samak that left out such telling (to a western liberal) strokes as his role in the Thammasat massacre, his subsequent attempts to block memorialisation of those who died therein (presumably because they were “Vietnamese”), his comparison of Bangkok homeless to stray dogs during the “street-cleaning” prior to the APEC summit and his suggestion that elephants be shot in order to dissuade their mahouts from parading them down Sukhumvit. Then again, it is doubtful that such a fine orator as Samak composed the memorable lines “Kill them, kill them” that poured out of radios prior to the slaughter in 1973, so there is that.

I hope this attempt to be more “constructive” will contribute to Mr. Carr’s ongoing enlightenment as he continues to read NM, especially the more “constructive” contributors like Suriyon.