Roamer's Column

To listen to, and read, what the chattering classes had to say about Dr Fenech Adami's elevation to the Presidency has been an odd experience.

His elevation will impinge on the performance of the prime minister. He has taken scant notice, if any, of his wife's preferences. Labour is miffed. He has been too successful a politician in the political reality that is Malta. The man will cramp the new prime minister's style.

The man who saved us from Mr Mintoff, that most confrontational of post-war politicians, the person who restored Malta's threatened and sickening democracy to life, who led the country into Europe, the man responsible for leading a government, which, for all its faults, created space for the citizen to develop educationally, socially, entrepreneurially, culturally, if he so desired, was all right, good man, but hey! What's all this nomination for the Presidency all about? Good horse, ran well, tired now; only one place for him, the knackers' yard.

This is poppycock. As appropriate as the secret nominees for the same office were deemed to be by the Opposition - two of them were constitutionally unsuited, so to speak - nobody in his right mind can say, hand on heart, that any one of them would have been a better choice than the one made by Cabinet. I understand that one or two, if not all of the three selected by it, were not even approached and asked if they would consider the appointment.

Dr Fenech Adami's nomination is not only well deserved; it is a natural choice. So, he has been around a long time; haven't we all? The question to ask is what has he been up to all this time? The answer is service. He has served, and served well. His integrity remained unquestioned throughout his political career. His commitment to duty is not in doubt. His ability has been self-evident for many years. He follows in what is becoming a traditional appointment where the person picked to become head of state has been plucked, with one exception, from the political ranks. (It is the same in Italy and Germany, but not in France, where the President is elected and executive). What mangled thought process would deny Dr Fenech Adami's nomination?

None on offer was more mutilated than Dr Sant's. He was quoted as calling the nomination "a vulgarity". Then there was the inevitable Santian hair-splitting. The Labour Party was not about to fall into traps of old, no sirreee. It will make a distinction between the office and the man. Interesting to see how this will translate itself when differentiation is made. Dr Fenech Adami the man is a scoundrel but the President is OK.

Mr Mintoff had no such qualms. With his usual sense of delicacy he told a corner meeting: "If the person occupying the office has betrayed Malta by making us lose our freedom, how can you respect him?" It is precisely the mind-set that must be overcome and this can only be done by precisely the example set by previous Presidents, who held a political viewpoint and still served the Presidency well.

Look at me, Mr Mintoff told an audience of no more than 200. He was offered the Kumpann tal-Unur ghall-Qadi tar-Repubblika on the 25th anniversary of March 31 (he designated the occasion in 1979 as Freedom Day) and if he did not quite two-finger the honour bestowed upon him, he decided he was not going to receive it in the same year that Malta was losing its freedom. "This is our 300th meeting", he told the assembly, and changed the figure to 40th when Dr Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici corrected him. It may be perverse on my part, but it strikes me that if both Mr Mintoff and Dr Sant disagree with Dr Fenech Adami's appointment, it most certainly has to be the correct one for Dr Gonzi and his Cabinet to have made.

Wrong division

Already we have been informed that the Leader of the Opposition regards today, April 4, when the new President is sworn in, as "a day of mourning". In Parliament, Dr Sant went further. The motion before the House was divisive. It was a word he was later to use in public. Dr Fenech Adami was "a divisive symbol". He compared Dr Fenech Adami's nomination with Agatha Barbara's and Dr Ugo Mifsud Bonnici. These were not leaders of their party. Therefore, he implied, they could make the transition to the Presidency without much ado.

Others have used this argument, but I ask: if Ms Barbara could make the transition from formidable, political obduracy to constitutional level-headedness, why cannot Dr Fenech Adami? Because he was the leader of a party? This simply does not wash. How could Professor Guido de Marco, who, after all, was the deputy leader of the Nationalist Party and an arch opponent of what Mr Mintoff and the Labour Party stood for during the Seventies and the Eighties, do the same? Is Dr Fenech Adami congenitally unable to assume the role of President of the Republic? Is his very ability his liability?

As to the divisiveness business, the Leader of the Opposition cannot be taken seriously. The man who divided the electorate over VAT and wasted half his 22 months in office replacing that acronym with another, CET, and brought division into his own party; the man who was trounced, electorally, in 1998 and unilaterally declared the new government "illegitimate"; the man who split the country over the EU and who could not tell a Yes result in the referendum from a No so that he had to be beaten again in a general election before he could accept the new reality, that man is hardly the one to speak of divisiveness.

Questions: did Dr Fenech Adami divide because he opposed Mr Mintoff's worrying regime with what they call might and main? Did Dr Fenech Adami divide because he opposed Dr Sant and opted for Europe? We are all Europeans now.

Did Dr Fenech Adami divide because he favoured, as Dr Sant and his predecessors did not, pluralism in broadcasting, the establishment of local councils and so many policies that his opponents, well, opposed? Did he divide because when his house was vandalised by Labour thugs and this newspaper was burnt down he told Mr Mintoff to his face that unless violence was reined in he could not be responsible for what could follow? To argue thus is to fall victim to spring madness, however tra-la-la, to stand logic on its head. With his track record, it ill-behoves Dr Sant to bang on about the "symbol of divisiveness" and to place it like a poisoned wreath around the neck of Dr Fenech Adami.

When Censu Tabone, who turned 91 last Tuesday, became the President of Malta, the Labour Party in its wisdom decided to boycott those occasions in which the man was present. What they didn't say about that appointment! Dr Tabone turned out to be a much-loved, much-admired President (incidentally, his charming wife, too, would have been happier anywhere but at San Anton). Who was being divisive even then? When Dr Tabone's time was up, he received due praise from the opposition for the way he had conducted himself in office.

A steady hand

All indications are that the government has been left in a safe pair of hands. Dr Gonzi's first week has gone well. He was clear in his own mind that Dr Fenech Adami was the best choice for the Presidency. His address to the motion of appreciation for the manner of Professor de Marco's Presidency was articulate and well founded (the unifying Leader of the Opposition chose not to say anything on the occasion).

Dr Gonzi's decision to hold a monthly press conference - no subject barred - was sensible: how else can he carry out his promise to bring government nearer to the people? And his awareness of the problems at the drydocks and shipyard, Air Malta, the port and in the area of pensions is acute. In the case of the latter he introduced a masterly piece of lateral thinking.

We have grown used to talking and writing about the unsustainability of pensions as the size of the working population decreases and the number of pensioners increases with better health care, etc. His approach was different. "The major challenge is not the financial sustainability of pensions but whether pensions are adequate. They have been capped at Lm4,200 for 23 years" and this "will only get worse in the future when people earn more and the gap between the average wages and pensions gets larger... Pensions will just not be enough for them to maintain their standard of living".

To my mind, nobody has said this before. Where we homed in on unsustainability because of diminished inputs, he zeroed in on the real issue: the pensioner's standard of living in an economy where wages were rising and pensions remained capped. Dr Gonzi's approach highlights the urgent need for reform, here. Landfills are in his sights. If there were better options to Mnajdra he would certainly consider them. The burden was on the optioneers.

So, yes. He is in control of his brief and the honeymoon is not over. That will happen on May 2 and, specifically, the day the silly season starts.

Disloyalty to good advantage

Somebody down here loves Mr Clarke, not least Richard Clarke himself. When he appeared before the September 11 Commission on Capitol Hill, he went there armed with his book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, and the agonised tones of the penitent. "I failed you all", he told the country in general and the bereaved families of 9/11 in particular. Some of these were in the room.

Mr Clarke was not being as ample as he was suggesting. What he really meant was that the Executive had failed America and the poor wretches whose only crime on that day was to be working at the Twin Towers when the terrorists who changed the world fired their hi-jacked aircraft into the World Trade Centre; the Executive and, in particular, President George Bush.

Mr Clarke was not a counter-terrorist chief for nothing, even if his enemies cruelly remark that, given September 11, that is exactly what, in effect, he was. His book was published a few days before he gave evidence. The timing was flawless. Behind the pain he saw the gain. I understand the publications into its fifth, approaching its sixth edition. Was it bluer-blooded, full-bodied patriotism that drove him to damn. It was certainly not a beggar-me conviction. Against all Enemies is doing for Mr Clarke in material terms what The Passion is doing for Christians all over the world in a spiritual sense.

Not since John Dean turned on President Nixon has Washington seen anything like this. Here is Mr Bush, contesting an election for the Presidency on the platform that he can keep America safe and uppers Mr Clarke to inform his American fellow-citizens that Mr Bush's hands are not the safest pair to secure their future. That is a damning indictment.

Mr Clarke's agonised sense of penitence comes at a price. The automated cash registers in bookshops are buzzing with the sound of purchase and debit entries all over the country. The doors within the White House have been opening and closing like bids at a bridge tournament as officials dart all over the place to consult tea-leaves and one another. But they are confident that the dam will hold. After all...

Why now? Why has Mr Clarke made a public confession (in effect an accusation) that he failed America and the Americans in 2001 when, from all accounts, he had already failed President Bush Snr, Clinton and only latterly Bush Jnr? Where was he when the American embassies were bombed in Kenya and Tanzania? Where, for that matter, were Mr Clinton and his executive? Where when American sailors were killed on the USS Cole? Where when the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was gamely hosting Osama bin Laden and his men?

Why did Mr Clarke explode now and not in 1996, 1998, 2000? Was he miffed, as has been suggested, that he did not get the appointment of Director of Homeland Security after 9/11? Ad does he, as has been reported, have a 'close friendship' with the unfortunately named Randy Beers, who is in charge of the nuanced Mr Kerry's foreign policy team? Was he dangerously inexact in his book when he claimed that Mr Bush's reaction to 9/11 was to see whether blame can be pinned on Iraq when the records show that his immediate focus was on Afghanistan?

It has been remarked that Mr Clarke's objective in publishing and damning was to "praise Clinton and bury Bush". Is this plausible, given the context of the Nineties? Same source recalled that Bill Cohen, who was Mr Clinton's defence secretary at the time of the Cole killings thought the incident "not sufficiently provocative". There was no response at all. You can imagine what that said for American resolve at the time in the eyes of Al-Qaeda.

At the end of the day - and what a day - those who question Mr Bush's failure to go into pre-empt mode prior to 9/11 are the very same who criticise him for going into pre-empt mode over Iraq. Would a pre-emptive war in Afghanistan, as opposed to the wishy-washy missile strikes that Mr Clinton ordered during his watch on targets that were not there, have made them any happier? Or would they have scurried to the United Nations as they never did when pre-emption was the guiding feature of Mr Clinton's military operations in Kosovo?

What strikes one is not Mr Clarke's book so much as the decision to hold a commission hearing that can be seen live on television everywhere in the world. During this serious procedure a nation publicly questions, through its representatives in the Senate, the Executive, the President himself, sensitive institutions, administrations past and present on a matter of war when the nation is at war; and all this during an election year. Moreover, it does so, as anybody who tuned in to any of the hearings, with skill, a high degree of intelligence and - courtesy.

Which other nation does that? France (Mr Chirac), Italy (Mr Berlusconi) and Germany (Mr Kohl) provide abject examples to the contrary. Which other democracy, except Britain, sustains such a procedure? Those who vilify the United States without pause and often with little cause, should pause, once in a while, and examine carefully the roots of their animosity.