A Tale of Two Rallies

Mrs. Garlic and I went to two DPP rallies this past weekend, one in Taipei City and one in Xinbei City, and the differences between the two were quite interesting.

On Friday night, we went to the opening of Li Jianchang’s 李建昌 campaign headquarters.  (The opening of campaign headquarters is the traditional way to formally launch the final stage of your campaign.)  Li is a four-term city council member running in District 2 (Nangang, Neihu), so you might expect that he knows what he’s doing.  He is also a member of the DPP’s New Tide faction, as was quite clear through the evening.  There were New Tide figures all over.  The host was a New Tide city council member from another district (Wu Siyao 吳思瑤).  Some of the speakers included former legislators Lin Zhuoshui 林濁水, Hong Qichang 洪奇昌, and Duan Yikang 段宜康, as well as former Taoyuan County executive candidate Zheng Wencan 鄭文燦 (who is supposed to be spending all his time in Xinbei City on Cai Yingwen’s campaign).

The event was held in a park right outside one of the exits on the Mucha-Neihu MRT line.  It was drizzly, but there were perhaps 1000 people.  That is a pretty successful crowd for this type of event.  (They also had the best cultural event I have ever seen at one of these rallies.  They had an all-girl group of music students playing traditional Chinese instruments.  You don’t expect to hear traditional Chinese instruments at a DPP event, but it didn’t take long for them to win over the audience.  They were spectacular.  For once, I would have preferred a (second) encore to more political speeches.)

Su Zhenchang 蘇貞昌 was the main speaker of the night.  He showed up at about nine and spoke for about an hour.  Two things were notable to me: the content and his speaking style.  Substantively, Su’s speech was notable for what was missing.  He did not say anything about the KMT, President Ma, China, Taiwan independence, ECFA, or anything else dealing with national politics.  Instead, his speech was entirely on local matters.  He spoke at length about the Mucha-Neihu MRT line and the Xinsheng Elevated Expressway scandal.

Stylistically, Su had the crowd involved the whole time.  He constantly wove humor into his stump speech, and he made the audience laugh every two or three minutes.  For example, when he was talking about the MRT line, he criticized the city government for putting lousy seats in the trains.  The seats slope forward a bit, and he described how he had to constantly fight to keep from sliding off and bumping his knees into the young woman standing in front of him.  As he described the awkward social situation (which was, of course, entirely the fault of the city government), we were rolling with laughter.

To hammer home the point that Mayor Hau should be responsible for his underling’s behavior in the Xinsheng Expressway case, Su told a story about drinking in the provincial government.  Back in the early 1980s, the governor was Lin Yang-gang 林洋港, a man famous for his ability to drink.  Lin loved to drink, and heavy drinking was common among the top officials in the provincial government.  When Lee Teng-hui replaced Lin as governor, there was a marked change in culture.  Lee could also hold his liquor, but he had stopped drinking because his son had recently passed away.  Since Lee didn’t drink, the entire drinking culture among the top officials disappeared.  As Su put it, whatever kind of leader you have, that’s the kind of subordinates you will have.  By implication, Hau is guilty as hell.

Maybe the most impressive thing to me was Su’s ability to get the audience physically involved.  As any teacher can tell you, an audience will retain content much more effectively if they are physically involved.  Su talked about how it was time to change the mayor before things got too bad just as you need to flip over a fish in the frying pan before it gets burned.  Then he had everyone hold out their hands, as if they were a spatula with a fish on them, and everyone flipped their hands over together.  Now this sounds hokey, and it is.  It is also a lot easier to ask people to do something like this than to get them to do it.  And even if they do it, they usually do it begrudgingly or sheepishly.  However, I watched the audience as he did this, and probably 90% of the people were flipping their hands and smiling.  They were involved.

Su was, of course, preaching to the choir.  And he was effective.  Those thousand people were almost certainly already his votes, but they left the event energized.  Because of this rally, they will expend more effort in trying to get Su elected.

The next night, we went to a Cai Yingwen 蔡英文 rally in Banqiao.  The rally was in a park near the Shulin train station, and I think it might have been organized by the local DPP party branch.  From 6:30 to 7:00, a few lizhang candidates spoke.  From 7:00 to about 7:45, each of the five city council candidates spoke, and from 8:00 to 8:20, Cai spoke.  The only political celebrity to speak was Zhuang Shuohan 莊碩漢, a former legislator from Banqiao.

The speakers were a lot less polished that those in Taipei City.  While Xinbei is being elevated to an equal rank as Taipei City and Taipei City Councilors have traditionally had fairly high profiles, it was clear to me that we shouldn’t expect to see many political stars emerging from the Xinbei City Council.

There was quite a good crowd.  It was a bit bigger than the one the previous evening.  I would estimate the Taipei City crowd at about 1000 people, and the Xinbei City crowd at about 1500.  One of the speakers claimed they had never been able to attract such a big crowd in this area in previous years.

Cai Yingwen’s speech was on a mixture of national and local issues.  She talked at length about President Ma’s failures, the significance of this election as a referendum on Ma, and how the DPP party image was better than the KMT party image (which was to her credit as party chair).  She also talked about housing prices and policies for senior citizens and young people.  And she criticized the United Daily News surveys that show her trailing by a lot.  (She seems overly sensitive about UDN surveys.  This makes me wonder if she doesn’t have a strain of Nixon-like paranoia.)

However, the strongest contrast between her and Su was in style.  Cai was calm, rational, quiet, logical, and boring.  A rally is not the time for a clinical lecture.  Everyone there already agrees with you; you don’t need to convince them.  What you need to do is fire them up so that they will go out and work for you as effective shock-troops.  The crowd was desperate to chant, cheer, and participate.  At one point, someone broke into her speech for a “Frozen Garlic” cheer (Cai Yingwen, Dong Suan!!).  The crowd momentarily erupted.  Then she cut them off and put them back to sleep.

At the ludicrously early hour of 8:20, she finished and the event ended.  She didn’t even stay around to shake hands.  (Most candidates shake a few hands as they leave the arena.  I wouldn’t think much of this except that Cai’s campaign seems to be founded on the notion that she should shake as many hands as possible.  Perhaps this only applies to scheduled events in traditional markets.)  I was stunned.

I wouldn’t call myself conservative, but I do have a healthy respect for tried-and-true methods.  In Su and Cai, we have a stark contrast.  This is Cai’s first time running for office, and she seems to be infatuated with the idea that she should do things differently.  Su is running in his eighth campaign (ninth if you count the 2008 vice presidential campaign), and he won seven of those campaigns (the winner of the eighth was eventually convicted of slandering Su during the campaign).  To me, Su looked like a master of his craft, while Cai looked downright amateurish.

thoughts on the Taipei County campaign

[note: I apologize for the rambling nature of this post.  However, it does reflect the muddled nature of my thinking on this subject.  And I feel the need to post something, since I have been quiet for such a long time.]

 

I’ve been trying to think about the mayoral race in Xinbei City, and I think I have some ideas about what each side is trying to do and what assumptions underlie those strategies.  I also think I don’t buy most of those assumptions.

Taipei County is something of an urban city overlaid on the foundation of a rural society.  Like Taipei City, there is a highly dense and fluid population.  Mobility is important, because when lots of people are moving in and out, they don’t have as many ties with local organizations and can’t be mobilized by traditional networks.  The best way to reach these unattached voters is through the media campaign.

However, Taipei County also has a different side.  In the 1950s and 1960s, Taipei County was a relatively small county, with a population much smaller than Chiayi, Yunlin, or Changhua Counties.  Its politics were arranged around local factions.  However, unlike most counties, Taipei County never developed county-wide factions.  Instead, the factions were all based at the township level.  So Banqiao had the Liu, Guo, and Haishan factions, Danshui had the Mai and Chen factions, Zhonghe had the Jiang-Lin and Lu-You factions, Yonghe had the Big Chen and Little Chen factions, and so on.  Even the small towns, like Wugu, Ruifang, and Shulin had their own local factions.  The critical point is that these factions never formed permanent alliances with each other, so that Taipei County developed a bewildering array of largely independent factions.  When the Taipei County population boom started in the 1970s, some of these factions faded away, their local networks swamped by the huge numbers of outsiders.  Others managed to survive and even thrive by somehow building ties to all these new immigrants and incorporating them into the factional networks.  So even today, urban Taipei County rests upon this more rural architecture.

In the past twenty years, most of the county executive races can be explained by reference to what the local factions did.  In 1989, the KMT nominated a NTU professor, and many of the local factions were not pleased.  The DPP’s narrow victory was attributed to the lack of cooperation from local factions.  In 1993, the KMT nominated a Sanchong faction member, and, again, many other local factions refused to support him.  He lost badly.  In 1997, most of the KMT factions supported the KMT nominee, but two local faction candidates ran independent campaigns and took just enough votes away for the DPP to eke out a narrow victory.  In 2001, Su Zhenchang won his re-election campaign in part because he had spent much of his first term building up good relations with lots of local organizations.  I wouldn’t say that he made friends with the factions per se, but he did steal away a significant amount of the support that the factions would normally be able to mobilize on behalf of the KMT.  It didn’t help that his opponent was Wang Jianxuan, a politician with a reputation for incorruptibility.  Factions probably didn’t see too much benefit in going all out for him.  In 2005, the KMT finally unified all the various factions around its candidate, and won easily.  Of course, there are other explanations for all these outcomes, but the faction-centered explanations aren’t easy to dismiss, especially from the KMT’s point of view.

So I think that the central assumptions of the KMT campaign are these.  First, Taipei County has fundamentally a blue-leaning electorate.  If everyone votes their party identity, the KMT should win.  The DPP only wins when it steals some KMT votes or the KMT vote is split.  Zhu Lilun does not need to win any DPP votes; he just needs to turn out his base.  Second, the way to turn out the base is to maintain good relations with all the local factions and various local networks and organizations.  There really is no need to engage the DPP in a media campaign.  He just needs to protect all the local networks, and he will win.  As a result, the Zhu campaign to this point has been all about meeting with locally important people.  And since the Cai Yingwen campaign hasn’t showed much inclination to try to horn in on this territory, Zhu has to be feeling pretty good right now.

I don’t like these assumptions very much.  The factions collectively matter, but I don’t think they are sufficient.  My guess is that they can turn about 10% of the total votes in one direction or another.  The KMT needs all or almost all of that 10%, but I doubt that this will be sufficient.  The KMT also has its base of loyal party voters who will turn out for the KMT regardless of what the local factions do.  However, I’m concerned that the KMT is ignoring a vital part of its potential coalition.  There are many voters who lean to the KMT and would probably vote for the KMT if they bothered to vote.  However, unlike the Zhu campaign, I would not assume that you can turn out all of them through local organizations.  Taipei County still has lots of people who are not plugged into any organizational networks.  The way to get these people to the polls is by raising the temperature of the campaign.  You have to get them excited so that they will mobilize themselves.  Zhu doesn’t seem to be doing anything for them.  I wonder if his campaign will be undone by a low turnout rate.  He might get all the loyal KMT votes, all the faction votes, and still lose.

 

The DPP campaign is hard to figure out.  Cai Yingwen seems to be spending all of her time visiting traditional markets.  (Note: exaggeration.)  She doesn’t seem to be trying to attack any of the local networks that Zhu Lilun is working so hard at cultivating.  I’m also getting a distinct feeling that she just isn’t working very hard at all, at least by the standards of most candidates.  I’ve traveled with a few candidates for a day, and the pace they keep up is generally stupendous.  I’m exhausted by mid-afternoon.  I’m getting a general impression (and I can’t cite anything in particular) that Cai Yingwen simply isn’t willing to live that kind of all-consuming campaign life.  Look, politics is difficult.  The winners are akin to professional athletes; they are at the very pinnacle of their profession.  This is Cai Yingwen’s first real campaign test, and she simply might be out of her league.  (And for those who think she is really concentrating on the 2012 presidential election, don’t imagine that that campaign would be any less demanding or that she also wouldn’t have to cultivate lots of grassroots power brokers.)

I’m also wondering about Cai’s media strategy.  She hasn’t gotten much press coverage at all, partly because she has decided to run a positive campaign.  Positive platitudes just aren’t very interesting, and policy positions in the middle of a campaign are cheap.  Of course the media is ignoring her.  This would be ok if she were cruising to an easy victory, but most polls show that she is losing.  One problem is that she isn’t winning enough of the swing voters because Zhu has an image as a capable administrator.  Now, I don’t have any idea whether Zhu is or is not a capable administrator, but I am sure that he will retain this image unless Cai decides to challenge it.  Zhu has a track record of about eight years from Taoyuan County, and I wonder if the Cai campaign has decided that voters in Taipei County don’t want to hear about Taoyuan.  The thing is, all these images are very shallow and could be changed dramatically with a bit of information.  We really don’t know anything about the Taoyuan experience (and Zhu isn’t trumpeting his triumphs there either), so one or two clear examples of bad administration might severely damage his reputation as a capable administrator.  I think that would go a long way to reducing his appeal to all the independent voters (who he isn’t courting very energetically anyway).

 

So right now I’m not terribly impressed with either candidate.  Both are courting their base almost exclusively.  Neither is projecting much of a dynamic image.  If nothing changes, turnout will probably be quite low.  The KMT will probably win because its base is slightly bigger than the DPP’s (though the margin is smaller than they seem to think).  However, both are leaving themselves wide open to defeat.  By ignoring the floating voters, Zhu is betting everything on the idea that his base will carry him to victory.  (Hey, it isn’t 2006 or 2008 anymore!  The gap between the parties is a lot smaller in 2010.  It’s a lot closer to the 2004 balance.)  Cai seems unwilling to follow Su Zhenchang’s strategy of ripping away some of the KMT’s organizational strength, and she doesn’t seem willing to engage Zhu directly in the media.

This will probably change over the last six weeks of the campaign.  Sooner or later, we will start seeing big rallies and appeals to all the undecided voters.  And maybe I’m missing a lot because I haven’t seen it reported in the news.  But so far (and so far as I can tell), I don’t like the choices that either campaign is making.

 

DPP Central Standing Committee election

I’ve been silent for nearly a month.  So sue me.  Nothing much has happened anyway, except for the ECFA signing, KMT city council nominations, a major judicial scandal involving a former elected official, and a few other things of equally minor importance.  Who wants to write about stuff like that?

Instead of stuff like that (that might have a real impact on the country’s future), I’m going to address something much more mundane today, the DPP’s recent Central Standing Committee (CSC) elections.

The DPP power structure is elected indirectly.  First, the party congress elects the 30 members of the Central Executive Committee (CEC), and then the CEC elects the 10 members of the CSC.  (Yes, this is exactly how the KMT does it too.  The DPP copied the KMT’s Leninist architecture.)  The voting is done according to the SNTV method.  There are also some ex-officio members of the CSC, including the party chair, the three leaders of the legislative caucus, any mayors of direct municipalities, and one county executive (chosen by the various DPP county executives).

The DPP formally abolished its factions a few years ago, and they persist in thinking that we are stupid enough to believe this fiction.  I will not cooperate by calling the factions “the former New Tide faction” and so on.  There are currently six factions to consider: the former New Tide faction, the Hsieh faction (centered around Frank Hsieh 謝長廷), the Su faction (centered around Su Zhenchang 蘇貞昌), the You faction (centered around You Xikun 游錫堃), the Grandparents faction (公媽派) (of older DPP leaders, such as Annette Lu 呂秀蓮 and Cai Tongrong 蔡同榮), and the Chen faction (centered around the former president).  Party chair Cai Yingwen 蔡英文 does not have her own faction; instead she is supported by other factions.  However, she is starting to develop her ties and you can see how a proto-Cai faction could emerge.

It is fashionable to say that these factions have no policy content, but I don’t think that is quite true.  Nowadays, you find the Taiwan fundamentalists mostly in the Grandparents and Chen factions.

So here is the result of the CSC election.  I recreated the voting from news stories, so I’m not 100% sure it is correct, but it seems to make sense.

Win?	name	name	votes	faction
	謝長廷	Frank Hsieh	4	Hsieh
	蔡同榮	Cai Tongrong	3	Grandparents
	段宜康	Duan Yikang	3	New Tide
	徐佳青	Xu Jiaqing	1	New Tide
	顏曉菁	Yan Xiaojing	1	New Tide
	林佳龍	Lin Jialong	3	You
	余政憲	Yu Zhengxian	3	Chen/Chen Ju
	蔡憲浩	Cai Xianhao	3	Su
	何志偉	He Zhiwei	3	(Su)
	陳明文	Chen Mingwen	3	?
No	張宏陸	Zhang Honglu	3	Su
Total			30

There are a couple of widely reported stories.  First, most people were surprised that Annette Lu was not elected.  Apparently she made a serious miscalculation.  The DPP rules guarantee that the ten CSC spots will have at least two women.  Lu first communicated with the other factions to determine if other women were running.  According to the China Times, she persuaded the other factions to withdraw all but one of their female candidates so that she would be guaranteed victory.  However, she then tried to exploit this concession.  Since only one other woman was angling for a position, Lu decided to throw her support to Cai Tongrong.  With one unfilled seat for women, the party would hold a second round of voting and Lu calculated that her overall prestige in the party would enable her to win that seat.  That way, the Grandparents would win two seats.  (If she had a vote or two to give away, Cai Tongrong certainly needed it.  If he had only gotten one or two votes, he would have lost.)  However, the New Tide faction caught wind of her stratagem, and quickly decided to add a female candidate and give each of its two women one vote.  Thus, Lu had zero votes, and two New Tide female candidates each had one, and no second round was needed.  (Oh, the joys of good organization!)  Of course, Lu has since denied that she was interested at all in running for the CSC.  Well, that’s what I would expect her to say instead of admitting to such an embarrassing blunder, but we have to at least store away (however skeptically) the possibility that she is telling the truth.

The other interesting story concerned the one loser.  Hsieh (with four votes) and the two women were clear winners.  The other eight candidates for seven seats all tied with three votes.  According to DPP rules,[i] ties are broken by drawing lots.  Chen Mingwen drew the short straw and should have been the loser.  Chen, as you will recall, is the former Chiayi County executive and is now a member of the legislature.  He isn’t really associated with a faction, though the various newspapers said that he is close to Cai Yingwen, and he was elected to the CEC with the support of the New Tide faction and Chen Ju.  Most sources copped out and simply listed him as belonging to the Chiayi faction, which doesn’t really exist as far as I know.  At this point, Su Zhenchang stepped in and instructed his footsoldier, Zhang Honglu, not to draw a lot, thereby yielding the last seat to Chen.

From one point of view, Su has gone mad.  The CSC has a two year term, so this is the body that will be making the important decisions about how the 2012 presidential candidate is nominated.  We all expect that to be a contest between Su and Cai.  Su just traded out a sure vote on the CSC for one who might side with Cai.  On the other hand, Su might be trying to expand his coalition.  Zhang Honglu is a minor Taipei County politician.  He doesn’t bring any independent support.  Chen Mingwen, with all of his support in Chiayi, brings something to the table that is worth wooing.  Now Chen owes him a favor, though we don’t know just how far Chen will feel obligated to go in repaying that favor or whether this will shift Chen into Su’s orbit.

As far as the balance of power goes, the most important trend is the decline of the Chen and Grandparents factions.  In particular, many news sources reported that the Chen faction has been shut out completely.  You’ll notice that I have classified Yu Zhengxian as being part of the Chen faction, but his victory was supposedly due more to the efforts of Chen Ju than to the former president.  (Chen Ju needs Yu for his family’s network in Kaohsiung County; she is clearly not part of the former president’s faction.)  Since these two factions are considered to be the redoubt of the Taiwan fundamentalists and the former president, their decline is significant.  It seems clear that the DPP is continuing its transition out of the Chen Era.

On the other hand, it would be optimistic to say, as the Taipei Times did, that this election marked the consolidation of Cai’s leadership.  Both Taipei Times and TVBS asserted that she could claim the support of six elected members of the CSC: the three New Tide members, Lin Jialong, Chen Mingwen, and Yu Zhengxian.  The China Times suggested that Cai lobbied to get Lin Jialong, Yu Zhengxian (via Chen Ju), and Chen Mingwen elected (supposedly, she asked Su to intervene on Chen’s behalf).  Going through the roll call this way makes it painfully obvious how tenuous Cai’s support is.  Cai’s current strength lies in a balance of power.  None of the factions are strong enough to control the party, and all of them are worried about other factions gaining too much strength.  Since she does not have her own army, Cai is not as much of a threat.  She is a comfortable umbrella for everyone.  And recall that everyone is supposed to be on the same side here – the New Tide faction might want more influence, but it doesn’t want the Su faction to be totally shut out of power to the extent that it might leave, and thus diminish, the party.

So who runs the party?  Well, we’re not sure.  It might be Cai, as Taipei Times and TVBS suggest.  On the other hand, a story from the Central News Agency suggests that the “New-Su-Alliance” (New Tide, Su Faction, plus He Zhiwei, who is associated with Su but is claiming an independent faction named the Green Friendship Alliance) was the big winner.  Did they mean that such an agglomeration exists or simply that the New Tide and the Su factions were the big winners?  Other media outlets, such as zhongguang radio, picked up this story and gave it the former interpretation.  Personally, I doubt there is a clear ruling faction.  Cai Tongrong is probably going to be in the opposition most of the time, but the other members will move in and out based on the question at hand and the shifting sands of power.  If she is a reasonably talented politician, Cai Yingwen should generally be able to form coalitions to suit her purposes.

I almost forgot to list the ex-officio members:

name	name	position
蔡英文	Cai Yingwen	Party chair
柯建銘	Ke Jianming	Legislative caucus leader
官碧玲	Guan Biling	Legislative caucus leader
潘孟安	Pan Meng’an	Legislative caucus leader
陳菊	Chen Ju	Kaohsiung mayor
蘇志芬	Su Zhifen	Yunlin County executive

No news article bothered to speculate on these people’s factional status.  I’m not sure at all, but if you forced me to guess, I think Ke gets along with and is trusted by everyone, Guan and Su are part of the Hsieh faction, and Pan belongs to the New Tide faction.  Chen Ju and Cai Yingwen head their own small power centers, though they are loosely allied with one another.

I was curious how things have changed since 2008, so I looked up a story in the China Times on the 2008 election.  Here’s how they described the CSC then.

name	name	faction	My comments
蔡同榮	Cai Tongrong		Taiwan independence fundamentalist
陳勝宏	Chen Shenghong		Father of He Zhiwei, so probably close to Su faction
陳明文	Chen Mingwen		Supported by New Tide
許添財	Xu Tiancai	Chen
羅文嘉	Luo Wenjia	Chen
段宜康	Duan Yikang	New Tide
徐佳青	Xu Jiaqing	New Tide
蘇志芬	Su Zhifen	Hsieh	Elected, not ex-officio
蔡憲浩	Cai Xianhao	Su
方昇茂	Fang Shengmao	You
蔡英文*	Cai Yingwen		Ex-officio, party chair
柯建銘*	Ke Jianming		Ex-officio, caucus leader
賴清德*	Lai Qingde	New Tide	Ex-officio, caucus leader
張花冠*	Zhang Huaguan		Ex-officio, caucus leader
楊秋興*	Yang Qiuxing	New Tide	Ex-officio, Kaohsiung County executive
陳菊*	Chen Ju		Ex-officio, Kaohsiung City Mayor; close to New Tide

The biggest change from two years ago is the decline of the ex-president’s faction.  Then, the Chen faction was still strong enough to put two of its members into the CSC.  The other thing that hits me is just how well the New Tide did two years ago.  They were described as one of the winners this year, but they arguably did better two years ago with claims on three of the ex-officio members.

Finally, I’m amused by statements that this election shows that the DPP’s intra-party democracy is a sham.  These statements are coming from both the KMT and from losers in this election, such as Annette Lu and Luo Wenjia.  They point to the organization involved, with people voting based on the instructions of their factions instead of listening to the appeals of various candidates as evidence that there is no democracy involved.  To that, I say pshaw!  Or maybe phooey!

The voters involved in this election are highly politicized and have strong opinions.  You simply aren’t going to change their minds about where they stand with a few speeches.  In the context of American politics, I consider myself to be what used to be called a “yellow-dog Democrat,” because I’ll vote for any candidate, even a yellow dog, as long as he’s a Democrat.  Does that mean that I am a mindless, brainless voter?  Of course not!  I understand the role that political parties play in the American system means that, based on my values, I always want the Democrat to win.  Even if there were an individual Republican who I preferred to the Democrat in a particular race, that Republican is sufficiently constrained by the other Republicans and by Republican voters that he or she will probably end up acting in ways that I don’t like as often as not.  So I have an easy vote decision: I vote straight ticket Democrat without needing to think very much.  Now, DPP internal factions are not the same as political parties, but the point is that these voters can make very good decisions about what is best for them and their values even when they are blindly voting according to instructions from their faction leaders.  In fact, one might go so far as to argue that by cooperating in this kind of organization, they are maximizing their influence.  Elections are, after all, a test of power.  Claiming an election is undemocratic is often the last refuge of losers.

As for the KMT, well, their last Central Standing Committee election featured so much vote-buying that the party chair cancelled the election.  If they are looking for an example of an election with questionable democratic credentials, they might start there.

---

[i] I’m always shocked that they can’t come up with a better tiebreaking system.  With so few votes, there is always a tie to break.  There has got to be a better way.

rumors

Lots of rumors are swirling around these days.  They are fun and frustrating at the same time.  I take them with a grain of salt, ready to disown them if they turn out to have no substance and equally ready to say “I already knew that” when they turn out to be correct.

So apparently former President Chen 陳水扁 announced that he will be running for the legislature.  Assuming that Lai Qingde 賴清德 wins the Tainan mayor election, Lai’s seat will become vacant and a by-election will be necessary.  Chen supposedly told someone that he would run for the seat.  Until his appeals are exhausted, Chen is legally not prohibited from running, and the seat is in Tainan, his home base.  On the other hand, no one has confirmed that Chen actually said or meant such a thing.  Also, my early handicapping is that Chen probably wouldn’t win.  The KMT is not that weak in this seat.  Lai won it by running ahead of the party list vote.  Former PFP legislator Gao Sibo 高思博 is primed to make another run at the seat.  Also, while Chen might get some sympathy votes from diehards, he would probably lose the swing voters who are disgusted with him.  This is the best case scenario, assuming that he either gets the DPP nomination or the DPP stands aside for him.  If he has to run against both a KMT and DPP candidate, forget it.  All in all, if Chen does choose to run, it will not end well for him.

The DPP is having major problems in Tainan, where both of the losers in the primary race are reportedly plotting to run in the general election.  Both Xu Tiancai 許添財 and Su Huanzhi 蘇煥智 have set of support organizations, a classic step one takes before running in an election.  (Perhaps the fact that they are only doing this now says something about why they lost the primary.)  Also, the TSU is reportedly interesting in offering one of them its nomination.  The TSU vehemently denies this and has accused the KMT of spreading vicious rumors.  I don’t know what to make of this except to note that Xu Tiancai has twice (1995, 1997) run against DPP nominees, so he has a track record.

Finally, mysterious polls say that the races in the north are tightening up.  Cai Yingwen 蔡英文 is only losing by five points, and Su Zhenchang 蘇貞昌 has actually overtaken Hao Longbin 郝龍斌, though none of the leads are statistically significant.  These results are being widely reported by the media so the polls must exist somewhere, but the interesting thing is that I cannot find either who did the polls or what the exact numbers are.  One story referred to KMT internal polls, but others mention “media” polls.  Until I see a source, I will take this with a grain of salt.

So we are to believe that the DPP is falling apart in Tainan, while the KMT’s lead is evaporating in the north.  If you combine this with recent events in Taichung, it seems that Kaohsiung City is the only race that is still going according to script.  …if you believe everything you hear, that is.

Update:  Sorry about that Kaohsiung thing.  I should have known better.  Yang Qiuxing 楊秋興 (loser of DPP primary) is now threatening to run as an independent in the general election.  So throw out the script altogether.

Surprise: DPP re-elects chair!

Ok, it’s not a surprise at all.  Cai Yingwen 蔡英文 was re-elected, beating You Qing 尤清 by a margin of 78192 to 8406.  That’s 90.3% to 9.7% for  those of you who have always wondered what a 90% butt-whooping would look like.  You blamed the defeat on factional maneuvering, as in “none of those factions, or anyone else, supported me.”

Somewhat more unexpectedly, after the vote was finalized, Cai also announced she will run for Xinbei City mayor.  I’m sure I’ll have something more to say about this over the next few months.

The race that I was watching most closely was the party chair race in Taipei City.  The incumbent chair was a Chen Shuibian crony, Huang Qinglin 黃慶林.  Huang was also one of Cai’s most vocal critics within the party.  Huang was defeated soundly by Taipei City Council member Zhuang Ruixiong 莊瑞雄.  I believe Zhuang belongs to the Frank Hsieh faction of the party.

Pressure mounts on Cai to run

The DPP mayoral nomination process for the other three cities has entered its final stages.  It was supposed to be done last week, but the DPP gave itself a one week extension.

There’s not much doubt that the DPP will nominate Su Zhenchang 蘇貞昌 for Taipei City, but the other two nominations are still very much in the air.  There is a strong push being made to shove aside the two obvious candidates, You Xikun 游錫堃 and Lin Jialong 林佳龍, in favor of the two top party leaders, Chair Cai Yingwen 蔡英文 and Secretary-General Su Jiaquan 蘇嘉全.  Neither Cai nor Su really wants to run, but they are under immense pressure to accept the nominations.  Cai threw Su under the bus first, calling on him to run in Taichung City a couple of weeks ago.  Yesterday, Su returned the favor, saying his campaign would only have direction if Cai were also to run.  (Funny, I thought they were supposed to be allies!)  For the first time in a couple of months, I am getting the feeling that Cai and Su will have to yield to the pressure and accept the nominations.

Why don’t they want to run?  There are a few common reasons.  Both seem quite happy in their present offices.  Both would be outsiders running a campaign without deep local connections and only six months to develop local credibility.  Neither has prepared at all for this campaign.  In Cai’s case, she wants to remain in national politics, with her eye on national issues such as relations with China, national security, the economy, and so forth.  Becoming mayor of Xinbei City would give her electoral experience and some experience in local government, but it would also force her to spend time on local government problems, like picking up garbage, enforcing parking regulations, and maintaining parks.  Cai has a chance to be the party presidential candidate in 2012, and I think her eye is firmly fixed on that opportunity.  Local governance is a distraction to preparation for that race.  Besides, she might lose this election.  Polls show her even with Zhu Lilun 朱立倫, not with a big lead.  For Su, the probability of losing is very high.  His job would be to lose as well as possible, hardly an attractive mission for someone who is already established in national politics.  Moreover, since no one wants to back a losing horse, Su probably wouldn’t be able to raise money easily.

Since they don’t want to run, why does everyone else want them to?  In a word, the alternatives are lousy.  In Taichung City, Lin Jialong has been running for more than five years, and is still nowhere in the polls.  He already lost by a convincing margin to Jason Hu 胡志強 once, and there is very little reason to believe it would be any better this time.  The other local candidates, such as Guo Junming 郭俊銘 and Qiu Taisan 邱太三, have even worse prospects.  In Xinbei City, the situation is perhaps even more desperate.  The DPP is mostly resigned to losing Taichung, but they think they should win Xinbei.  At the beginning of the year, the KMT was saddled with a lousy incumbent, Zhou Xiwei 周錫瑋, and both Su Zhenchang and Cai Yingwen were leading him in the polls.  Since then, Zhou has withdrawn from the race in favor of Zhu Lilun, Su opted to run in Taipei City, and Cai doesn’t want to run.  What looked like a likely victory for the DPP has turned into a likely defeat.  As in Taichung, the other potential nominees aren’t appealing.  Former Premier You Xikun has emerged as the strongest of the bunch, but he still trails Zhu in the polls but a wide margin, as much as 20%.  At this point, the most likely outcome of a You candidacy would be something like a 55-45 defeat: respectable, but a clear defeat nonetheless.  If the DPP wants to win, they probably need Cai Yingwen.

One thing this illustrates to me is just what a tough game electoral politics is.  If you look like a loser, you will be cast aside.  Lin Jialong has been working hard for five years, but since he has little in the way of public support, the DPP won’t hesitate to push him aside if there is any better option.  You Xikun has had six months to prove that he could win the Xinbei race.  There hasn’t been much movement in the polls.  Well, he had his shot, and now it’s time to look for someone else.  The KMT was desperately trying to do the same thing in the Kaohsiung and Tainan races.  The difference is that they never found any better options.  Even Wang Jinping 王金平 didn’t look like he would win Kaohsiung, and Wang is such an effective Speaker that they party can hardly afford to sacrifice him for a few extra percentage points.  The DPP has better options in Cai and Su.  Cai is clearly more popular than You and is even with Zhu.  Su is only even with Lin, but that makes him a far better vehicle for the DPP.  Su hasn’t even started to develop a campaign yet; he can only go up.  No voter is going to re-evaluate things with a Hu-Lin matchup.  With a brand new face in the race, there is a chance that voters will take a fresh look, not only at the DPP side, but also at Jason Hu and his record.

I’m not sure that nominating Cai and Su helps the DPP in the long run, especially for the 2012 presidential race.  However, it would clearly make them stronger in this year’s elections.

unanimity?!?

Yesterday I noted that 24 of the 33 DPP had signed a resolution in support of Cai Yingwen’s 蔡英文 re-election as party chair.  I now have to update this: all 33 have signed.  Even Cai Tongrong 蔡同榮, who accompanied You Qing 尤清 to register for party chair, has signed (he was the last holdout).   I didn’t expect You to really threaten Cai’s re-election bid, but this show of power is impressive.

I think Ke Jianming 柯建銘 gets the credit for building this coalition.  Ke has been in the legislature since 1992.  The DPP changes its caucus leaders regularly, but they keep coming back to Ke.  I think he must be better than anyone else at building coalitions.  There are a few other people who keep popping up in these positions, such as Cai Huanglang 蔡煌郎 and Cai Tongrong, but Ke is the most common.

It is interesting that Cai Tongrong eventually signed the statement.  I think that might have something to do with maintaining his influence in the legislature.  You can’t be a caucus leader, official or unofficial, if you are out of step with the rest of the caucus.

Grandparents don’t like Cai

The DPP chair race between Cai Yingwen 蔡英文 and You Qing 尤清 is being presented as the “Grandpa and Grandma Faction” 公媽派 (supporting You) against everyone else.  In other words, only the old people (and Taiwan independence fundamentalists) in the DPP are opposing Cai.  I’m not sure whether the media invented this term or if it comes from Cai supporters.  Either way, it is brilliant in marginalizing the challengers to Cai.

Today, most of the DPP legislators signed a statement in support of Cai.  At the time of the report I read, 24 (of 33) had signed.   The holdouts included Cai Tongrong 蔡同榮, Wang Xingnan 王幸男, and Guo Wencheng郭玟成.  I don’t know much about Guo, but Cai (a longtime overseas independence activist) and Wang (who once tried to assassinate Chiang Chingkuo) are the very essence of this idea of old, out of touch radicals.

You Qing contests DPP chair

The DPP’s deadline for registering to contest the upcoming party chair election is tomorrow.  Today, former Taipei County executive You Qing 尤清 registered his candidacy.  He suggested that current chair Cai Yingwen 蔡英文 should run for Xinbei City mayor instead of running for re-election as chair.  You is currently also running for the DPP’s nomination for Xinbei City mayor.  (Yes, that doesn’t make much sense.  Meet You Qing.)  You declared that if he were elected party chair, he would give up his candidacy for mayor.

You was accompanied by former Examination Yuan president Yao Jiawen 姚嘉文, legislator Cai Tongrong (Trong Chai) 蔡同榮, Zhang Guimu 張貴木 (a crony of former Vice President Lu 呂秀蓮), and former Taipei County legislators Zhang Qingfang 張清芳 and Wang Shuhui 王淑惠.  The first three are the important ones, and the common thread is that they are all Kaohsiung Incident Era figures and all Taiwan Independence fundamentalists.  That’s a pretty succinct description of the DPP factions that do not support Cai Yingwen.

UDN Poll: Ma is doomed!

This headline was inspired by a headline in the pro-Royalist Bangkok Post: “Anti-Government Protests Turn Bloody.”  (For comparison, the New York Times headline was something like, “protesters dump blood”.)  Since this is a blog about Taiwanese politics, and not Thai politics (and my mother sometimes mixes them up), I’ll stop the (morbidly fascinating) Thai tangent now.

So President Ma is not necessarily doomed, but he did get a bit of bad news.  The United Daily News published a poll on its front page showing that, if the election were held tomorrow, he would lose to Su 38-29, and he would tie with Cai, 33-33.  Let’s not pretend this is any kind of prediction about what will actually happen exactly two years from now.  (If this were an election year, election day would be tomorrow.  By the way, today is the sixth anniversary of 3-19, the assassination attempt against Chen Shuibian, or, if you prefer, the faked assassination staged by Chen.)  A TVBS poll published today found nearly the same amount of dissatisfaction with Ma, but instead of asking how voters intend to vote in the next election, they asked how they would vote in the 2008 election if they could do it over today.  Ma beat Hsieh by 41-31 in that item.

The significance of this poll is that provides more dramatic evidence of how far President Ma has fallen in his two years.  Just over 50% of people who said they voted for Ma in 2008 say they will vote for him again; over 20% expressed support for Su.  Ma satisfaction ratings have fallen to a new low of 27%, while 53% are dissatisfied.  (The TVBS poll released today had these numbers at 27% and 51%, respectively.)  Among blue identifiers, 36% are dissatisfied.  Moreover, they are dissatisfied for a whole host of reasons, such as China policy, economic performance, failure to implement reform, failure to carry out campaign promises, rising health care premiums, and so on.  There is no easy fix when there are so many different problems.

Yesterday at the KMT central standing committee meeting, Chairman Ma expressed his determination to carry out real reform, even if it cost him votes and popularity.  (He was referring primarily to health care, and secondarily to black-gold politics, bureaucratic reform, ECFA, and so forth.)  One wonders if Ma will follow Chen’s path.  After accomplishing very little with a moderate approach to China in the first two years of office, Chen’s administration took a sharp turn toward national identity issues in the second two years.  Ma might likewise opt for a radically different policy agenda in the next two years.

The other significant thing about the UDN poll is its impact on the DPP side.  Su is still the most popular candidate, but he is not the only viable presidential candidate.  Cai is in the same league.