Friend calls me today: there's a concert for Tibet at 9:00. Am I going? Certainly, I explained. I'm going to need a new lost cause after this election........no, seriously, after months of hearing how Ma was going to blow away Hsieh (and hearing people laugh in my face when I mentioned the possibility of a Hsieh win), everyone is now nervously moving into the "too close to call" position. I'd be laughing my ass off, but being up here in Taipei has me completely strung out on coffee and chocolate muffins. I've been carefully testing them at every Starbucks to make sure they are of the same high standard everywhere, but I still am a few short of the thirty needed to satisfy Central Limit Theorem....
1:30 ...my wife calls to complain about Ma's ridiculous claims that the Greens are going to have him blown up with a suicide bomber...."Hope nobody does anything!" she says crossly. One of the Blue neighbors came around to our house to complain that she had to go too far to vote, a thought my wife worked assiduously to encourage, she said. My wife is a Tibetan Buddhist, and said that at the Thursday night meeting last night, her Lama gave a talk on events in Tibet and the sad history of Chinese colonialism there. It obviously had an effect. All over Taiwan, this week, dozens of gurus are giving similar talks.....
[Taiwan]
Well if you want to hear my opinion, what has happened to change the reporting of the media is this:
ReplyDelete1) Hsieh gains a few points in the Blue polls after the debates.
2) (most importantly) The Blue papers can no longer publish polls due to proximity to the election.
3) KMT break-in and Tibet
4) A lot of foreign journalists come to Taiwan and actually start to speak to people on the ground.
1 set the stage. 2 deprived the Blues from influencing foreign journalists. 3 added hype 4) is what they should have been doing in the first place, but is only natural.
Suddenly Hsieh is being reported as close because, aside from 3, things have been going as they should be going in a free and fair election.
2 is quite unfair, but nevertheless polls are what most uneducated people base their opinions on when following elections.
I am not surprised at all.
"I'd be laughing my ass off, but being up here in Taipei has me completely strung out on coffee and chocolate muffins. I've been carefully testing them at every Starbucks to make sure they are of the same high standard everywhere, but I still am a few short of the thirty needed to satisfy Central Limit Theorem....
ReplyDeleteIf you ever need any help with that, just let me know.