Premier's tough talk masks a deep insecurity

He may sound confident declaring he won't resign and that he won't exercise his constitutional prerogatives to call a snap election. But if you take a really close look, it's clear that Samak doesn't seem to possess the same degree of confidence in stating that he won't be kicked out of office.

That's because he knows that, despite the brave face he has tried to put on in his public statements, he may end up with his belly up because of any one of the numerous legal cases against him and his party. These are up for court verdicts in the next few weeks.

"In a sense, I am just a low-cost airline," he intoned in his latest Sunday television talk show.

He likened himself to a budget airline with a low capital base. "That means this low-cost airline could stop flying any time."

By way of comparison, he said: "Thai Airways, as the national airline, can't terminate its service. But Nok Air, the low-cost airline, could cease its operations any time."

In other words, Samak, in his more pragmatic moments, realises how vulnerable his position is. And when he isn't using bluff as a political tactic, he can even be disarmingly defensive:

"Thaksin [Shinawatra] and I are two different people, with different financial standing, different backgrounds, and I may not have the kind of far-sighted vision that he has. But I am a politician with low capital." That's when he threw in the low-cost airline metaphor.

And that in itself is quite a revelation because when push comes to shove, Samak won't be able to withstand the mounting political pressure to ease him out of his current position.

His political demise could come about in one of numerous scenarios. The most obvious calamity for him would be a negative decision by the National Election Commission, which is due to vote soon on whether his People Power Party should be dissolved after one of its deputy leaders, Yongyuth Tiyapairat, was found guilty by the court for cheating in the last general election. In that case, Samak and all the other executive members of the party would be banned from politics for five years.

Or he could, as the Thai saying goes, "die in shallow water" by being removed from office if the NEC rules that, by hosting a cooking programme on TV after he took office, he was in fact an "employee" of a private business concern - a conflict-of-interest violation under the constitution that could disqualify a Cabinet member from his post.

Thaksin's political exile may offer Samak a temporary reprieve. But Samak, despite his subtle but desperate effort to form an alliance with the military establishment, is anything but secure in his political tightrope walk.

He has not come out to officially deny the allegations by his own party's Northeastern faction that he is a member of the "Gang of Four" that is plotting a treacherous, breakaway move against Thaksin. He is in no way in control of any significant faction within his own party, let alone enjoying the loyalty of the coalition partners.

His lack of political vision and his open hostility against the urban middle-class and the intelligentsia has contributed to the general consensus that Samak, second only to Thaksin, has become the leading threat to national reconciliation.

The more often he makes public pronouncements about serving the full four-year term, the more Samak reveals how insecure he truly feels.

The most obvious proof came on Tuesday, when he told a closed-door meeting of disgruntled party members who had filed a petition claiming that Samak had failed to prevent the police from issuing arrest warrants for Thaksin and his wife: "If you continue with this campaign, you obviously don't want me as premier. In that case, I will consider myself…"

When the crunch comes, the tough talker in public suddenly became a sympathy seeker in real life.

(Share your views in my blog at http://blog.nationmultimedia.com/ThaiTalk)