Alert readers will have noticed something absent from the pages of this newspaper over the last week: pictures of Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
Of course the events of the last week, as Taipei saw its worst flooding in recorded memory involving the loss of 25 lives, the flooding of thousands of properties, and billions of dollars of losses, were not manufactured. Here was an unprecedented crisis. So where was the mayor? Not apparently at Taipei's emergency task force center when the president called on the night the typhoon struck. Nor was he widely seen in the days following the typhoon. This was very strange. Here was a city in the soup, and a very unpleasant soup it was, too. Here were people who were both frightened of the flooding, grieving over those who had died, shocked by the damage to their property, worried about the effect of the flooding on their workplaces or businesses, hard put to find food in the shops and bereft of ways to get to work.
Given the exemplary behavior of New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in rallying his devastated city only days before in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist bombings -- behavior that won the increasingly unpopular New York mayor such plaudits that it has significantly changed expectations regarding New York's upcoming mayoral race -- we might have expected to see Ma taking a leaf out of the same book. Not that he really needed Giuliani's example. One of the rules of smart politics is to be on the scene of a disaster as soon as possible, something George W. Bush learned to his cost. But not Mayor Ma.
Someone might argue in Ma's defense that grandstanding for the cameras was not the most important task in the wake of the floods, but that restoring the city to normalcy was the first priority.
Splendid reasoning, though hard to square with the snap-happy mayor. But if this were true why is it that we have seen almost nothing of Ma telling us when our power would be turned on, our water begin running again, the MRT begin service or, perhaps even more importantly in terms of the public nuisance involved, when the mountains of stinking trash would be removed from the city's streets.
It's a simple equation really: the city government is supposed to be either cleaning up the mess and restoring services or coordinating with other agencies involved, such as Taipower. Ma as the head of that government and in the wake of such a crisis is the point man for telling the people who elected him what is going on.
They would naturally want to know that what needs to be done is being done at the highest possible level, not left to some low-level bureaucrat to sort out.
In this sense, then, Ma's recent low profile not only contrasts strongly with the activist stance of Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (
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