Taipei Times: As the DPP's executive manager for the election campaign, what are your goals for the campaign?
Su Tseng-chang (
This year it's much simpler: There are only two sides, and only by grabbing half of the total votes can one side win. So the DPP's minimum target is to get 11 percent more of the votes, and each city and county will set its own goal with that target as the starting point.
PHOTO: GEORGE TSORNG, TAIPEI TIMES
In fact the DPP only needs to obtain six percent more of the votes because, after the last election, part of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) defected and formed the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU), and former KMT chairman Lee Teng-hui (
Those who supported Lee have switched their loyalty to the pan-green camp and they make up about five percent of the voters.
TT: Where did that 5 percent come from?
Su: In a one-to-one election, especially an election for the country's leader, the electorate can be statis-tically represented by the shape of an American football, with two small pointed sides and a big middle part.
The key to winning is the neutral voters who are the majority of the electorate. We can see from polls that the neutral voters are moving toward the DPP's Chen-Lu ticket.
From two recent polls conducted by the DPP among those who are non-partisan and do not always vote for the same party, we see that in the first poll the Chen-Lu ticket originally fell three percent behind the Lien-Soong ticket, but drew six percent ahead in the second poll. That is a difference of nine percent in total.
We define the "neutral voters" as those who are not biased, and have a strong opinion and high moral standards; basically, the metropolitan voters.
TT: There are about six million metropolitan voters, about a quarter of the total population in Taiwan, in the Taipei metropolitan area. As the Taipei County Commissioner, you are the executive manager of the DPP's campaign, while Taipei City Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
Su: Although my fellow party member [DPP deputy secretary general] Lee Ying-yuan (
But frankly, the voters in this area are the most difficult to manipulate. I do not have a secret weapon or effective strategy. But I have to stress that Ma's election experiences and management ability are questionable, and he looks better than he really is.
Although we are both executive managers, he is a counterfeit. He got to the position because Lien and [People First Party Chairman] James Soong (
Ma doesn't understand a thing about the KMT's traditional election strategies and he knows nothing about the party's mode of mobilization, organization and vote-buying.
I also believe that at least five to six percent of Lien's votes in the last election will float to Chen's side because these voters actually supported Lee, so they voted for Lien.
TT: Won't the pan-blue camp's strategies and modes change? Do you think the pan-blue camp will still practice vote-buying now that they don't have the resources as a party in power would?
Su: Old dogs can't learn new tricks, and we have seen that very clearly in the past six months. President Chen kept proposing clear visions for the future, including constitutional reform and referendum, and the Lien-Soong ticket kept objecting; yet they made a U-turn in the end and followed Chen's path devoutly.
Recently we saw local politicians who had engaged in vote-buying for the KMT in the last election going to jail, but now the KMT is still spending like nothing happened.
The budget for running the KMT's headquarters for a year is NT$8.6 billion, but with the DPP, although we are in power now, we still rent our headquarters from someone else, and the budget for running the DPP's headquarters for a year is only NT$0.3 billion.
The voters should be able to see clearly that the pan-blue camp hasn't changed. On the one hand they lack a vision for reform, and on the other hand they can still only defame others and engage in vote-buying.
The public should also recall that four years ago Lien and Soong attacked each other viciously, but now they are holding hands as if Taiwanese people were afflicted with collective amnesia. And they are still acting childishly about the loss after more than three years, so we can only stabilize domestic politics by letting them lose again.
I want to use an example to show how ill-mannered the Lien-Soong ticket is when it comes to democracy:
When US President George W. Bush won the election, his Democratic opponent Al Gore had more votes in the first round of votes, but after the court ruled that Bush had won the election, Gore acknowledged his defeat and attended Bush's inauguration ceremony. I was also there and saw how well-mannered Gore was.
However in Taiwan, when A-bian [
Their bad manners are the roots of the political chaos in Taiwan during the past three years.
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