These moves have only served to further highlight the questions in voters' minds of the PAC's competence to govern. Magoba's standing among black voters and promising levels of support for the PAC have declined steadily over the past few months. To its credit, the New National Party finally seems to have realised the extent of its image problems and is at least beginning to address these basic problems. The most important and visible instance is Marthinus van Schalkwyk's trip to Sharpeville and his brief flirtation with ringing rhetoric worthy of an Abraham Lincoln or a Mandela. The Nats' problem, however, is that a short election campaign is not the best place to rebuild your image.
Campaigns can only highlight, define and sharpen an image that has been built over time.
The trip to Sharpeville should have been the very first thing that Van Schalkwyk did when he took over the party - followed up regularly by similar events, and then gradually by important shifts in party personnel and policies. In the long run, such a strategy, if sustained and well executed, would offer the NNP the hope of survival, and even a potentially improved position to appeal to a broad cross-racial coalition of socially conservative voters. However, positioning itself as the bastion of law and order and traditional values will take time and sustained sincerity. In the short term, the NNP finds itself gradually squeezed as it fails to find new black votes, and the energetic Tony Leon and the Democratic Party raids its traditional white support base. But simply shifting gears is not as easy as Nixon made it sound, especially if voters and the news media have a memory.