Democrats were to launch a star-studded party to rally around Senator Barack Obama’s historic White House bid yesterday, with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton set for a symbolic gesture of unity after their tense primary showdown.
Obama, 47, who will become the first black presidential nominee, said on Sunday he would try to convince voters he is just a normal middle class American despite his exotic upbringing and Republican claims he is an elitist.
“You’ll find out, ‘he’s pretty much like us,’” Obama told supporters referring to himself, days after lambasting his Republican rival Senator John McCain for being unable to say how many homes he owns with his multi-millionaire wife.
Though the Democratic National Convention is Obama’s moment in the spotlight, his former foe Clinton will be watched almost as closely, under intense pressure to unify Democrats after their bitter nominating clash.
As Republicans picked at the wounds of their marathon battle, a Democratic official said on condition of anonymity that Clinton was expected to release her haul of delegates, leaving them free to vote for Obama in tomorrow’s symbolic roll-call vote.
The former first lady will host a reception for her delegates piled up in a countrywide string of primaries and caucuses in the first six months of this year, a day after addressing the convention tonight.
Republicans however are attempting to play on the anger of Clinton supporters who feel their heroine was deprived of her rightful spot as the nominee, or even a vice presidential nod, partly through sexism.
A hard-hitting McCain political ad said Clinton had been passed over for “speaking the truth” about Obama’s political agenda during their acrimonious battle.
“The truth hurt and Obama didn’t like it,” said the ad, issued a day after the presumptive Democratic nominee chose foreign policy expert Senator Joseph Biden as his No. 2.
Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani meanwhile said that Obama, whom Republicans say is woefully inexperienced, had been too weak to put a formidable figure like Clinton on the ticket.
A new USA Today/Gallup survey yesterday suggested that the general election was still up for grabs, with voters harboring misgivings about each candidate.
Half of those polled said Obama “may be too closely aligned with people who hold radical political views” and 57 percent said they were concerned he lacked the experience to be an effective president.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has