SELDOM HAS a country been blessed with such contrasting, yet complementary, founding fathers as Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley.

Although distant cousins - itself a blessing as their disagreements seldom rose above the level of a good-natured family squabble - they were polar opposites in nature and outlook. They agreed on rigid adherence to British parliamentary tradition, but diverged on almost everything else.

"THE BEST laid schemes o' mice an' men, Gang aft a-gley" ­ go oft awry. In politics, where personalities loom so large and the media glare magnifies every mishap and mistake, Robbie Burns' old saw goes double. Take the situation in Israel and Palestine.

DEMOCRACY IS faith in collective common sense. It's a belief that fickle and short-sighted individuals will be wise en masse.

"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried," goes the famous Churchill cliché. But he also remarked that, "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

POLITICAL partisanship is a democratic fact of life. Virtually every country that votes its leaders into office is plagued by party tribalism.

Perhaps because it has been holding elections longer than anywhere else, Great Britain seems to be reasonably free of this dreaded virus.

But even the United States, which likes to boast of being a democratic model to the world, is practically split in two between the Democratic coastal blue states and the Republican interior red states.

HAD P.J. Patterson retired two or so years ago his legacy would have been on the whole a positive one. History would have remembered him as a man who had guided his ship of state fairly safely through the shoals of globalization and left a good launching pad for his successor. As it is now he is on track to go down as the second worst Prime Minister in Jamaica's history.

Suppose Bruce Golding had been shot and killed? This was the first thought that hit me when I read Wednesday's 'Women shot near Golding' headlines. Would Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) extremists have reacted by gunning down a senior People's National Party (PNP) figure in retaliation and initiated a vicious no-holds-barred, tit-for-tat vendetta? Would angry Labourites have torched Gordon House and New Kingston and Sam Sharpe Square? Would JLP mobs have attacked PNP strongholds and sparked off a hundred mini civil wars?

' POPULISM IS one of those terms that no-one seems to be able to define precisely. But it can probably best be described as politics which caters to the short-term demands of the mob at the expense of long-term national development. It is government that provides bread and circuses instead of roads and aqueducts. To paraphrase an old cliché, it's giving people fish to eat instead of teaching them how to fish.

The comrades heaped sugary praises on P.J. Patterson during last Sunday's PNP conference, and as expected Labourites poured out vitriol in response. But just how good or bad a leader has our longest serving Prime Minister been?

Obviously not all the positive or negative achievements of his administration can be solely attributed to him. But in the end the buck stops at the top. Leaders always take the credit and so must also get the blame for anything that happens under their watch.

THIS COUNTRY'S murder rate has nearly doubled over the past two years and may now be the highest in the world. By right, people here should be frightened and angry, afraid to go out at night and mounting mass demonstrations during the day demanding that the Government stop the slaughter.

Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair.
- George Burns

OR MR. Burns might have added, writing newspaper columns and hosting radio talk shows. But though things always look simple from the outside, politics requires a special breed.

Most people, when they get up close to the reality of actually trying to get elected and help to move the levers of government, usually recoil in horror at the mind-numbing boredom and grinding repetitiveness involved. Giving the same speech 200 times and immersing yourself nightly in the pages and pages of dense legalese which parliamentary bills consist of would probably drive most people stark raving mad. But it's the kind of stuff successful politicians thrive on.