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Editorial: For Chen, history repeats itself

Last year we had a party; this year we have a hangover. How else to describe the gloom with which we greet Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) first year in office. The euphoria of seeing the KMT booted from office tended to distract from the problems ahead, obvious though they were. For wasn't the situation a rerun of Chen's 1994-98 mayorship of Taipei, where he found his most visionary policies stymied and his budget savaged by the city council, controlled at the time by a New Party-KMT alliance. If, as Karl Marx said, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, then all we can say is we're not laughing yet.

The problem with "Taiwan's first-ever democratic transfer of power" as the events of a year ago were billed is that the transfer was, of course, so limited. And perhaps the most serious criticism to make of the president's performance in the past year is that he seems neither to have understood the limitations on that power nor found ways to overcome them. The book An Account of Lee Teng-hui in Power (李登輝執政告白實錄) talks at length of how Chen took instruction from Lee Teng-hui on the fine art of being president. What a pity he didn't study more of the dark arts of getting one's way, so capably demonstrated by Bill Clinton in the second half of his first term as he faced down a hostile congress.

Given the DPP's minority position in the legislature, implementing pet projects was never going to be easy. But Chen had the advantage of the bully pulpit of the presidency, instant media attention whenever needed, to take his projects to the people, to initiate a public debate which could engender a demand for change that the legislature dared not stand in the way of. Eliciting change should have been the ever-present refrain of the government. Perceptive observers might have expected this opportunity to be missed from the tenor of Chen's inauguration speech, which famously, was more about what he wouldn't do than what he would.

The debacle over the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant (核四) will always stand out as Chen's political nadir. It is not that Taiwanese love nuclear power -- though the KMT's cronies love building the plants -- rather that after almost a decade of Taipower lies about possible power shortages, there was need for a careful government information campaign both to reassure people about power supplies and raise their awareness of the undesirability of constructing the plant. An anti-nuclear consensus could have been created such that the legislature could only defy at its peril. It wasn't and the government failed.

The fight against black gold and the death of the 3-3-3 welfare project were other opportunities where skillful handling of public relations could have cowed the legislature. Most of the anti-black gold legislation has been delayed in the legislature indefinitely by the KMT which obviously doesn't want its corrupt practices messed with in an election year. So why didn't the government name and shame? Because it wanted cooperation from the KMT? It never got any so what did it have to lose? Meanwhile if the wonders of the 3-3-3 project had been talked about longer, if people were led to think that this was something that was actually going to happen, the largess was going to be forthcoming, woe betide the opposition that wanted to stand in its way.

The main reason for disappointment with Chen's first year, of course, is that so little has been achieved. The main criticism of Chen in this regard is not that he lacks vision -- unlike say Lien Chan (連戰), a near-death experience masquerading as a party leader -- but that he lacks political cunning. During his Taipei mayorship, Chen demonstrated great administrative ability but a disastrously ill-tuned political antenna. So far, his presidency has shown the same shortcomings.
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