Smear tactics seen as ploy to cover pan-blue's faults

"After being beaten in the 2000 election, the pan-blue camp has since tried to stage a comeback. But in order to cover up its own poor performance, it has tried to drag down the DPP to show that it is just as rotten as the KMT."

Michael Hsiao, a sociologist at Academia Sinica

A surge in negative campaigning by the pan-blue alliance over the last week reflects its intention to cover its own failings by smearing the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), academics said yesterday.

On Feb. 2, fugitive tycoon Chen Yu-hao (陳由豪) accused President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and his aides of taking illegal donations from him.

Since then, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and People First Party (PFP) alliance has cashed in on the issue and accused the DPP of more involvement with "black-gold" politics.

The DPP, however, denied the accusations, and yesterday, after the pan-blue camp failed to provide evidence to support its charges, the DPP took legal action against pan-blue legislators who made the accusations.

The director general of the pan-blue camp's campaign, Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), also announced that only certain spokespersons were eligible to speak on behalf of the alliance's presidential campaign.

Wang's order was intended to stop individual KMT or PFP lawmakers from calling press conferences to make accusations.

Academia Sinica sociologist Michael Hsiao (蕭新煌) said that the pan-blue camp was using the "rotten apple" approach in a bid to bring down the DPP.

"After being beaten in the 2000 election, the pan-blue camp has since tried to stage a comeback. But in order to cover up its own poor performance, it has tried to drag down the DPP to show that it is just as rotten as the KMT," Hsiao said.

He said that "since the transition of political power in 2000, Taiwanese society has been filled with cynicism."

"The pan-blue camp's accusations leveled at the DPP, therefore, seemed to have made the two sides look as bad as each other" in the eyes of the public, Hsiao said.

Hsiao said that the pan-blue camp's negative campaign was a "very low campaign strategy," adding that "voters would not be tricked by this attempt to bewilder them."

Ku Chung-hwa (顧忠華), an executive member of the Taipei Society and a sociology professor at National Chengchi University said that because the campaign had become a "zero sum" game for the two camps, the two parties would not balk at demonizing and "murdering the characters" of the rival candidates.

"I do not expect the mud-slinging to show any signs of abating before the election as each camp thinks it is a rational strategy to hurt the rival in order to gain an edge for itself," Ku said.

"We can only hope that the politicians will pay attention to common sense and realize that they, like everybody else, should treat each other with respect. But of course, this expectation is often distorted by the race for power," he said.