Vice President Annette Lu's (
"Lu has been raising her voice more and more since the end of the presidential election," said Chin Heng-wei (
"All those issues just display how she has been ignoring the entire administration, and reveal her ambition of succeeding Chen in the presidency," Chin said.
The issue of whether to set up a committee to replace the government's special investigation task force, which was organized by the judiciary and the police, to speed up the effort to solve the March 19 asassination attempt has now become a theatre in which Lu can take center stage.
According to the Presidential Office, Chen is going to have a tea party with the heads of the government's five branches today, during which they will discuss whether to form a special committee to investigate the shooting.
However, the president's staff is angry that Lu seems to be trying to dominate the issue, and had even gone so far as to make erroneous statements about the president's idea to form a committee, thereby misleading the public and the media.
"The vice president is trying to tell the public that the establishment of a special committee was her idea," a close aide to the president said. "But this is far from the truth."
One senior official told the Taipei Times yesterday that Chen was very irritated after Lu made a phone call last month to a live TV show attacking the investigation's performance. During the show, she claimed she was authorized by the president to make those comments.
"The vice president has taken some `unexpected' action recently," the official said, "especially when it comes to talking about the gunshot incident."
"She criticized the secretary-general of the National Security Council for not `properly organizing' the press briefing [after the assassination atempt], then she claimed that she was the real target of the shooter. Then she even made a comment completely contradicting the task force's report, saying that she believes there were two shooters, while the task force said there was only one," the aide said.
Moreover, while Chen has put all his trust in the premier for taking charge of the post-typhoon relief efforts and has stayed away from the areas affected by the typhoon in order to not interfere with the government's rescue efforts, Lu still rushed to central Taiwan to inspect the condition of the disaster area and express her concern about the victims.
However, residents and the media both gave negative comments of her performance, which they described as "showing off too much."
"The vice president has no authority to allocate any government resources and is not allowed to conduct relief operations. Wherever she visited, she promised to `give anything,' but just made government officials, who should be spending their time conducting post-typhoon relief operations, put aside their work to accompany her," said Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Hung Chi-chang (
"Many people said that President Chen downgraded his position from the head of state to a presidential candidate by campaigning every moment during his first term, and they said that whatever the president did was aimed at only goal: to win a second term," said political columnist Hu Wen-huei (
"Now, Chen has adjusted his role since he won the election," Hu said. "However, now we just have another would-be presidential candidate who enjoys the same official stature and security requirements as Chen."
"The controversies [Lu] has created lately are more than she has done in the entire past four years," Hu said.
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