KMT Veep Choice J-Wang is Awesome UPDATE X2

Keepin' the construction-industrial state chugging along.

UPDATE: Don't miss this excellent post about how the Blue candidates are connected to the deaths of 1980s independence and democracy activists.

I have to admit I've been terribly missing former Presidential candidate Hung Hsiu-chu, who had a gift for alienating voters, but Eric Chu, KMT Chairman and Presidential candidate, has attempted to right things with me by appointing the awesome Jennifer Wang as his Vice Presidential Candidate. Joey Neihu, the alleged offspring of Johnny Neihu and Phyllis Diller, conceived under a full moon and grown in a petri dish, has the call:

Last month, Chu finally selected his running mate for the election, Jennifer Wang (王如玄). Problem. The staff at KMT HQ clearly didn’t do enough vetting. The brown stuff duly hit the fan as the media started to delve into Wang’s financial background. Following days of intense media speculation, Wang made public a list of assets and properties under her and her husband’s names: together they own four plots of land, seven buildings and possess NT$28.59 million in savings. Rumors persist over past speculative sales of military housing units.

This is all rather unfortunate, since Wang and her hubby, not exactly short for cash, rent a taxpayer-funded government dormitory, provided at a highly-subsidized rent — allegedly NT$2,000 per month. It gets worse: irony of ironies, Wang’s husband is director of the Judicial Yuan Department of Government Ethics. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Solidaritytw translates some poll data. DPP team Tsai-Chen continues its enormous lead over the KMT's Chu-Wang. It also said that 65% polled think Wang is hurting the KMT. Solidarity perspicaciously comments:

SET-TV notes that the farther north the respondents are the more of them believe Wang is hurting the ticket, indicating she’s doing the most damage within the home territory the KMT can’t afford to lose.

Indeed. Not only is Wang and her real estate kingdom hurting the KMT in its core areas, the party's inept response ("it was all legal") hasn't helped. The fact that it was legal is what makes it so awful; the System has normalized such behavior. Jason Hu, the savvy politico, former three-term mayor of Taichung, and now Chair of the Chu-Wang comedy team, observed publicly that it is hurting the campaign (see Solidarity). He also noted that Wang is a complete tyro who has never campaigned.

As Joey Neihu alluded to above, the Wang choice has raised another issue for Eric Chu, that of his competence. All across Taiwan surely many heads are coming to the same conclusion: why did his team do such a poor job of vetting and preparing this person for the position? Chu is simply -- incompetent. We've already had eight years of that, people must be saying to themselves...

UPDATED: I went to look at the Wayback Machine to see what edits were made to Wang's Chinese Wiki page after she jumped on board the Chu campaign. Most prominently, the Nov 19 version of her Wiki page retrieved from the Wayback Machine has no section on her humble origins, which the current page does.
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