The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has enough experienced campaigners and intelligent operators — and has had enough time in power — to be held accountable for poor strategy and disorganization.
After several disappointing election campaigns and wavering efforts at party reform, the hard reality is that poor strategy is much more self-destructive for the DPP than similar conduct in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Because the DPP lacks a firm electoral base at the local level and struggles to compete with the KMT’s formidable web of patronage, it must rely much more than the KMT on print and broadcast media to get its message across.
The problem with privileging media activity over good old-fashioned stumping throughout ordinary communities is that important arguments and valuable opportunities can be lost in the 24-hour cycle of news thanks to poor timing, crude execution and sheer laziness.
DPP legislators are probably patting themselves on the back over the Ministry of Education’s decision last night to cancel certain pamphlets discussing education and gender equality. The offensive thing about these items was not the message, but the medium: simplified Chinese characters, as used in China.
The legislators were well within their rights to ask why a ministry would want to distribute material using a foreign script to government departments around the country, especially given that the content had nothing to do with the debate on traditional and simplified script.
What should frustrate and worry DPP supporters, however, is the superficial way in which their legislators took this controversy to the next level. With President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) sounding very defensive about comments he made recently that Taiwanese in China could gain from being literate in simplified Chinese — comments that, it should be repeated, are not unreasonable — the DPP might have made a direct hit on the president by asking why, after a full year in office, he is simply unable to enunciate a coherent policy on something as concrete and straightforward as a written language.
Instead, the legislators attacked him over what, at worst, was an example of bureaucrats attempting to impress their superiors and wasting a lot of money in the process.
With the DPP busying itself with silly accusations of Ma “lying” to the public, it is failing to nail this issue by not exploiting dissent in the KMT on what its legislators are and are not willing to sacrifice in the course of cross-strait detente.
With political rhetoric steadily being reduced to vying for the nightly sound bite, experience around the world has shown that debate is cheapened even as it grows louder.
But if sound bites are going to be the political slogans of the modern era, it is essential that the DPP gets its sound bites right. This takes harder work and a lot more savvy than the party is demonstrating at this time.
If the DPP is to develop an arsenal of arguments that can hurt the KMT at the next legislative elections, it is going to need to dig deeper and do the research to find out what voters want. The time has long gone when swing voters or unenthusiastic voters can be mobilized by politicians who have little to offer other than shrill nonsense on cable TV news.
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