The Presidential Debate

Because the Friday forum was so tactically similar to the Sunday debate, for brevity’s sake I will only recap the debate here. According to TVBS, Tsai won the main event, with 31% thinking she had the best performance, compared to 20% for James Soong (宋楚瑜) and 18% for Eric Chu. Moreover, 34% preferred her policies, compared to 17% for Soong and 15% for Chu. So Tsai was rated below her polling average and running mate, and Soong punched above his weight.

This matches what happened in the debate. The key causes were Soong’s centrism and memorable closing statement, and Chu’s kamikaze strategy. Chu attacked Tsai even more often than Jennifer Wang spoke up for herself the day before. His opening and closing statements were cannon shots at Tsai. Every time he was asked a question, he spent the first third of his time attacking her response to the previous question, the second third answering the question he’d just been asked, and the final third attacking her position on the issue.

Tsai performed well. By reasonably and intelligently refuting all Chu’s charges she had time to address, she resisted the attempt to change citizens’ perceptions of her and prevented Chu from igniting post-debate media narratives about her. And Tsai would have taken shots at Chu, Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), and the KMT, no matter the strategy Chu used, because they provide so many targets. Her best retort was fending off Chu-KMT deprecations of her 20th century property deals by saying her father worked hard for that land, then implying Chu uses his executive positions and land policies to make money for his family and enrich big business.

That said, spending so much time responding to Chu prevented Tsai from making a full and positive case for her agenda. It was frankly a relief when she returned to the positive and uplifting character of her campaign outreach in her prepared closing remarks. Though he failed to KO Tsai and doubtless lowered his own favorability, Chu may simply feel satisfied about making her seem colder than she did before.

Since negative campaigning hurts both the attacker and the attacked, the biggest beneficiary of the debate was undoubtedly James Soong, who only received difficult questions from the moderators and was free to rise above the fray and show voters a Middle Way between the warring major parties. Like in 2012, the two major-party candidates only asked him whether he agreed with their criticism of the other side. They do this because they don’t consider him a threat, but Soong spun it as proof of his centrism and cleanliness. Tsai should be a good sport and ask him a serious question or two next weekend.

Soong has adapted to public opinion the way the KMT should be doing, but isn’t. In 2012, he failed to differentiate himself from Ma, but with Ma and his policies now so unpopular and Chu lashing himself to the mast of that ship regardless, the ceaselessly center-seeking Soong has plenty of running room. His proposals and promises are vague, and he never tells you what the tradeoffs for his policies are. But he has a genius for saying instinctively appealing things that resonate with what your neighbors think, like “under my administration, we’re going to overtake South Korea” and “my parents’ generation saw war and chaos, and mine saw our rise to prosperity, but I’m worried so much about the next generation, and I’m in this race to look out for them.” He told voters that both major parties and their presidents have failed them for the past 16 years, which is a one-sided, self-serving, and perhaps even nihilistic message when you think about it, but one that matches what the average voter subconsciously believes.

Soong’s closing statement epitomized his talent. He emphasized unity, and the contribution everyone has made to Taiwan’s democracy. He talked about the example his departed parents set for him. He pulled out a picture of the late and saintly grandmother Chuang Chu-yu (莊朱玉), who for 50 years used her income and savings to make NT$10 lunches for Kaohsiung’s poor laborers; the whole nation mourned her death. Soong promised that if elected he will put her on a commemorative coin in order to remind Taiwanese of their goodness. He then started weeping as he noted Taiwanese have gone through poverty, and he doesn’t want the next generation to return to that. He noted two septuagenarian predecessors who reformed their countries, Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) (the PRC and ROC seem to be the limits of Soong’s political memory). He proclaimed Taiwan must recover its pride and asked everyone to give him a chance to serve them, then gave three 90-degree bows.

Yes, this was a pure appeal to emotion, but with all the negative energy Taiwanese politics has had in recent years, and in that debate as well, people sincerely appreciated this emotive affirmation of their basic goodness from a senior statesman. Soong’s campaign still looks hopeless, but at least it’s positive.

Soong’s moment was heightened by its contrast with Chu’s ludicrous assertion that he had decided to replace Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) and run for president, violating his promise to New Taipei voters, the KMT charter, and public morality, because a grandma in Tamsui told him that if he didn’t run the Jade Emperor, a high-level deity, would never forgive him. The unbelievability of this cynical fable has made it a source of great merriment to Taiwanese netizens.

I personally will always remember Chu’s debate because he said so many familiar things that he sent me back in time. To confirm my feeling of deja vu I watched the first presidential debate of 2012, and then the second, and then the 2008 debate, and then some of the 2010 ECFA debate for good measure. With that I could confirm that this weekend Chu simply attempted to recreate Ma’s 2012 performances. He is essentially finishing off the Ma cycle by mimicking him.

Most of Chu’s criticisms of Tsai—that the DPP is obstructionist, that so many members of her team served in the Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) administration, that she opposes the 18-percent civil servant interest rate though she benefited from it, that her cross-strait policy doctrine is unclear, that she equivocates on policies, that she wants to close off the country and send cross-strait relations back 20 years—were taken verbatim from Ma’s 2012 debate statements. The attack on her past property transactions replaced Ma’s references to Su Jia-chyuan’s (蘇嘉全) farmhouse and the Yu Chang case. The sneering smile Chu gave whenever Tsai rebutted him, meanwhile, called to mind the less exaggerated faces Ma Ying-jeou made at Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) in 2008.

Most importantly, Chu based his own candidacy on Ma’s cross-strait policies of bilateral economic liberalization and the 1992 Consensus, as has his campaign. His biggest innovation has actually been to dumb the Ma platform down, as demonstrated by his main-theme ad One Taiwan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjvMHNX2GJs). Chu’s arguments are bereft of the numeracy and attention to detail that made Ma compelling, perhaps by conscious choice, perhaps due to a difference in ability. Though Ma’s statistics and details sometimes belied correlation-causation errors, on the surface they gave the impression he really knew what he was talking about. He managed to make all the same criticisms of Tsai much more concisely than Chu, giving him time to present a positive and comprehensive policy platform of his own.

Frankly, Chu is much less capable than Ma, whether as a debater, a campaigner, or a party chairman. Just months ago many people called Chu “Ma 2.0”. Chu has proven they were mistaken. He isn’t an upgrade of Ma; he’s the shareware version of Ma: slower, less functional, and available only for a three-month trial period.

This would be a problem even if Chu could wind the clock back to 2012, but over the past few years a critical mass of citizens have decided Ma’s policies failed to deliver, and the economy is now stumbling into contraction. Fatally, Ma promised not just an improvement on the Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) era’s GDP growth, but the memorable dream numbers of 6-3-3 (6% annual GDP growth, 3% unemployment, and US$30,000 average income), for the low, low price of signing ECFA. Rather than acknowledging painful tradeoffs, Ma promised everything would go well for everyone, using the KMT’s then-sterling economic reputation as collateral. Now it’s payback time.