There are times for a politician when a perception of strength trumps a perception of compassion.
In President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) case, that time is now, and the reason for its timeliness is that just about everyone is lining up to criticize him.
This weekend there are dragon boat races around the country, and consistent with his sporting image and past practice during his time as Taipei mayor, Ma was set to take part in a dragon boat contest in Taipei.
But politicians from both sides of the fence have expressed dissatisfaction with Ma, saying that he should be tending to the wounds of the farming industry and other sectors in the south, who are mopping up after seasonally heavy rainfall.
Ma should have known from the outset that canceling his dragon boat jaunt and touring rain-affected areas in the south was the sensible political thing to do. It seems he did not. But now that he has changed his mind and pulled out of the Taipei bash, he hardly looks any better: It is perfectly obvious that he was responding to harsh criticism and not out of a last-minute crisis of conscience.
The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) criticism of Ma is hardly worth the attention given to it in the media because most ordinary people will be spending some time yet avoiding the party’s rhetoric altogether. No matter how well DPP Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) performs, there is no avoiding the wilderness effect of losing a presidential election when you don’t have control of the legislature.
Instead, it is the latest round of criticism from his own party’s legislators that is making Ma look increasingly wobbly.
Ma’s response has been to let the Presidential Office spokesperson cover for him. Big mistake.
If the spokesperson is to be believed, the president now believes that touring disaster-affected areas poses a risk to the Constitution, given that the premier is the executive’s traditional link man in delivering onsite relief.
We can only deduce that when presidents Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) toured disaster zones during their tenure that they also came perilously close to damaging the nation’s most important document.
So, instead of either participating in the races or touring the waterlogged south, Ma is doing neither.
There are a number of people patiently waiting to capitalize on such preposterous behavior. Chief among them is Ma’s party colleagues in the legislature, who have continued to exploit the youth of this government and targeted Ma personally to advance their agendas.
As an exercise in prioritizing images of authority, this nonsense over dragon boats and disaster zone tours is small change. But as a harbinger of conflict between the president and his own party on genuinely important affairs of state, all of this has currency.
The longer Ma neglects competent public relations work and allows his party to pillory him, the less confidence he will instill in people just trying to get by. And for as long as Taiwan is a democracy, it is these people, not smug party hacks, whose confidence he must retain.
In the meantime, Ma could do worse than draw up an agenda and stick to it, rather than capitulate every time his would-be allies start whining.
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