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EDITORIAL: When you
get what you asked for
It is kind of ironic to see President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) popularity ratings
plummet so quickly in the four months between his re-election and his second
term inauguration. From garnering a majority of the vote in the Jan. 14
presidential election he has now hit a rating of less than 20 percent in recent
polls. Ma has gone from hero to zero in no time at all.
It seems that the 51.6 percent of the electorate who voted him back into power
are just now waking up to the fact that he is just another manipulative
politician without their interests at heart. Ma pays back his political
benefactors in Beijing and Washington, as well as the heads of some of the
Cabinet’s ministries, but he does not seem to care about the well-being of those
who really put him in power — the heads of Taiwan’s small-to-medium sized
enterprises and the public at large.
With Ma’s fuel and energy price increases and the proposed capital gains tax on
securities trading, Ma is hitting his real supporters where it counts, in the
wallet — and they are finally getting to see what kind of a president he truly
is.
However, it is too late. It is too late for his erstwhile supporters to say he
is not looking out for their interests. It is too late to try to block his
ill-timed economic proposals in the legislature. It does no good to tell a
pollster now that they do not think he is doing a good job, because they voted
him in and like it or not, we must live with him for the next four years.
Ma made it abundantly clear in his first term what to expect from him in a
second. He trod all over the rights of farmers, had administration members
engage in closed-door meetings with Beijing officials and failed to deliver on
his promises of economic growth — even when Taiwan was rebounding after the 2008
recession. He made decisions with no regard for public opinion and shied away
from contact with the outside world, earning him the moniker the “Facebook
President.” He proved himself unable to listen to countervailing opinions and
failed to lay any groundwork to make good on some of his better policies, the
result of one, for example, has meant a lack of tour bus drivers for the hordes
of Chinese tour groups visiting the nation.
His incompetence in handling the Typhoon Morakot disaster shocked many and the
zeal with which he pursues the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) vendetta
against former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and the Democratic Progressive
Party has left many people with a negative impression. Ma, who prides himself on
his sense of unerring justice, seems to have eroded the very system that could
have kept justice alive by making sure that prosecutors go after political
enemies, while ignoring the wrongs of political allies.
In all the fields that count, Ma has demonstrated unimaginable ineptitude — in
military relations, in democracy building, in economics, in negotiations, in
simple people skills.
However, the 51.6 percent who re-elected him to serve a second term, decided to
give him another chance perhaps because his incompetence had not hurt them yet.
Sad as it is to say though, these voters have no right to express
dissatisfaction now, for he is the president they asked for.
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