COMMENT | We are into the fourth month of Anwar Ibrahim’s premiership and as the calendar flattens against the wall, we feel the distance growing between Anwar as a campaigner and as premier.

Of course, the pursuit of power and the actual wielding of power are quite different things, particularly so when the head honcho is dependent on the support of parties he had attacked many times.

But the rhetorical negotiation of tight corners is not something that should daunt a virtuoso campaigner.

Perhaps what Anwar needs is to invoke the concept of the premiership as a “bully pulpit”, the term former US president Teddy Roosevelt conjured to convey his presidency’s enormous powers of suasion that the office allows the incumbent to shift the populace to his point of view...