Lai’s National Project of Hope

I haven’t been blogging as intensively this last election cycle as I did in previous years. The main reasons for this are things that have to do with my personal life, but a less important — but still real — reason I haven’t blogged a lot during this presidential election is that I don’t find any of the main candidates particularly inspiring. No matter who wins, we will be looking at a major step down in the quality of the president.

That said, I have been impressed with the positioning coming out of the Lai camp over the last week or so.

Lai has consistently led in the polls, but not by enough to be very confident. He doesn’t seem positioned to rack up a 56% vote share like Tsai did. The opposition support is split among three different candidates, but there might be enough opposition to defeat Lai if they could cooperate. That’s easier said than done and it probably won’t happen, but it’s not completely out of question. There is a certain amount of fatigue with the DPP government after eight years in power. Economic growth isn’t terrible, but it’s not fantastic either. The opposition consistently complaints about DPP corruption. There aren’t any sensational corruption cases to to latch onto, but there is a sense that the DPP is funneling contracts to its supporters rather than spending money in a completely neutral way. That’s not really corruption by most standards; there are no examples of DPP politicians shoveling big wads of money straight into their own pockets. It’s normal money politics – perhaps a bit unsavory but hardly the most egregious violation of rule of law that you can imagine. And while the current government can point to all the policies it has implemented over the last eight years, it doesn’t feel like Taiwanese society has been fundamentally transformed and we are now living in some sort of boom times. There is a vague itch for something a little different.  That is Lai’s biggest challenge. Attitudes about identity, the political parties, and China will determine how most people vote, but some there are some voters who don’t want to hear about these old topics anymore. For many of these voters, there is a sense that Lai and the DPP don’t have anything other than China to fall back on. What else is there?

Last week, the Lai team began to roll out its comprehensive vision for Lai’s presidency, dubbed the National Project of Hope (NPH) 國家希望工程. This promise is to be a full political platform, with sections on most important questions including sovereignty, economic growth, education, social policy, and so on. The package was put together over several months by a large team including several think tanks, social organizations, academics, practitioners, party workers, and other stakeholders.

Every campaign takes positions and makes promises, so that’s not what I’m impressed with. I don’t have many opinions about which concrete policies are better than others. Rather, I’m interested in its potential to shape campaign discourse in more subtle ways.

This project is forward-looking. One of the challenges for any VP seeking the top job is striking the right balance between running on the record of the incumbent president and setting out your own vision.  Tsai is not highly unpopular, so there is no need for Lai to distance himself. However, she isn’t so overwhelmingly popular that he can coast to victory by promising more of the same. Lai’s NPH strikes a nice balance: he seeks to build new things on the foundations she laid. He doesn’t want to spend his time and energy defending her record in office. He can simply portray that as a necessary (and positive and desirable) prerequisite for him to take on a new set of challenges. Hey, let’s talk about those new challenges facing us, not things that happened five years ago. Politicians usually sound better when they are laying out a vision for a better tomorrow than when they appear to be stuck in the past.

The project is optimistic. The focus is on creating a better tomorrow rather than relitigating the past. When I thought about what was missing from this package, I realized Lai hasn’t said a word about transitional justice. Tsai put a lot of energy into transitional justice, and not many people are satisfied with the results. Lai is sidestepping these sorts of questions and talking about things like Taiwan’s AI potential and creating an even better National Health Insurance program.

This project is coherent and comprehensive. It gives the impression that Lai has thought about all his policy priorities and how they fit together, which ones are more important and which ones are less important, and whether they contradict each other or complement each other. It also gives the impression that his policy agenda stems from a common set of values rather than being put together haphazardly.

As an example of how this matters for political arguments, Hou recently decided to make a big policy announcement about healthcare. If he is elected, he promises to raise spending levels on National Health Insurance to 8% of GDP. (It is currently about 6.5%.) (Aside: I’m not sure why Hou thought he should steer the public discussion toward National Health Insurance in a campaign against two doctors. I might have chosen something else more in my wheelhouse.) When asked about this, Lai answered that this is the wrong way to think about the problem. Simply setting up a spending target will end up wasting a lot of public money. The policy should be aimed at helping people, not spending money. Lai pointed out that his proposal will inevitably raise spending levels, perhaps to 8% and perhaps even more, but that should not be the starting point. Rather, we should start by asking what needs to be improved and how do we go about improving it. As a doctor, he had plenty of ideas about how this should be done which he talked about in some depth. I found this to be a much more sophisticated, persuasive, and enticing appeal than Hou’s simplistic call for raising spending to 8%.

As far as I can tell, Hou’s team hasn’t put together a similar comprehensive policy agenda; they seem to be picking out policy positions as they come to them with not much coherent underlying theme. The KMT has the human capital resources necessary to put a full policy agenda together, but Hou hasn’t been preparing to run for president very long. Remember he just got reelected as New Taipei mayor a few months ago. He hasn’t been thinking about national policy for the last three or four years. Lai’s NPH helps him highlight how much more prepared he is to be president.

At least we can understand why Hou hasn’t spent the last few years getting ready for this race. Ko doesn’t have any such excuse. Ko he has been planning to run for four full years. He has had plenty of time to do his homework and learn all the details of various policy questions. It’s true that his party doesn’t have the same level of human capital as the two major parties, so he doesn’t have as many experts to draw on. Still, with so much time, he could have put something together if he wanted to. He hasn’t shown much interest in doing the hard work. He seems much more interested in his social media accounts than in putting together a credible policy agenda. His slogan is “do the right thing, do things right.” That sounds great, but eventually some voters are going to start asking what exactly is the “right” thing is. Not every decision comes down to right and wrong; sometimes the decision depends on values and priorities. When disillusioned voters ask what the DPP has besides China, DPP speakers can point to the NPH and say, “this is how we plan to reshape society; this is specifically what else the DPP offers. And by the way, what does Ko offer? He isn’t telling you anything about how he will govern beyond a few vague slogans!”

Let’s shift gears here, and ask a slightly different question. How is Lai’s NPH different from Tsai’s agenda? On sovereignty, relations with China, and Taiwan’s place in the international community, it isn’t different at all. Lai marches in lockstep with Tsai’s vision. When he talks about these questions, he might use slightly different wordings, but there is no substantive difference. Rather, the effect is to communicate that he has internalized her positions and adopted them as his own.

On purely domestic issues, there are some subtle differences. I already mentioned the absence transitional justice in Lai’s NPH. Another absence has to do with judicial reform. Tsai, a lawyer, cared a lot about judicial reform. Lai, not a lawyer, doesn’t seem very interested. This is probably politically wise. Surveys show that large numbers of voters say that judicial reform is important. However, there isn’t a common consensus on how to reform the judiciary, and the actual reforms haven’t been that popular. In the real world, judicial reform isn’t a winning issue.

One thing Lai is clearly interested in is the healthcare system. He spent a lot of time and energy talking about how he will reform the National Health Insurance and the long term care plans. As a doctor, this is right in his wheelhouse. I didn’t hear anything that Tsai would disagree with; this is more a matter of priorities than policy direction.

The common perception is that Lai is socially and economically more conservative than Tsai, and you can see hints of this in the NPH. In various interviews last week, I can remember Lai saying the words “gender equality” exactly once, and he didn’t stop to elaborate on the idea. I don’t remember him saying anything about gay rights or marriage equality at all. The gap between rich and poor plays a much, much less prominent role in Lai’s rhetoric. I didn’t hear him say anything about the minimum wage or low wages in general. And when he talked about immigrant labor, he was worried about solving Taiwan’s economic problems, not with how Taiwan treats its immigrant labor force. When he spoke about his vision for Taiwan’s economic development, especially in the high tech sector, he tended to speak glowingly about how competitive Taiwan’s corporations are. Taiwan will do well in the race for AI, for example, because Taiwan’s high tech companies are uniquely positioned to take advantage of global opportunities. I can imagine Tsai saying roughly the same things, but substituting “workers” or “people” for “companies.” I don’t want to overstate this difference. While I think Lai is somewhat more conservative, it’s not like he is a doctrinaire free market believer and she is an inflexible socialist ideologue. They are both mostly pragmatic.

In the end, I don’t think the rollout of the NPH is going to fundamentally transform anything. However, it might marginally shift how people talk about the candidates, the parties, and the race. He wants the discussion to be about him and his hopeful vision for the future, not a referendum on Tsai and whether she lived up to everyone’s hopes and dreams. A subtle nudge is good enough for Lai. He’s winning right now; he doesn’t need to fundamentally shake things up.