The slick re-launch of Pasuya Yao’s mayoral campaign drips with spin and begs the question: Can voters really complain when they vote on style over substance?
The News Lens
Date: 2018/08/27
By: TJ
Credit: Reuters / TPG
Since securing the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)’s nomination to be its Taipei mayoral candidate, Pasuya Yao (姚文智) has hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons, beginning with an ill-staged effort to appeal to younger voters by trotting out his cat, Togi, for a photo call and peaking with a call for members of his own party to resign if they failed to declare loyalty to him over his incumbent rival Ko Wen-je (柯文哲).
Then, less than 100 days before voters hit the polls, Yao decided to reboot his campaign, asking voters for forgiveness and the energy to re-familiarize themselves with “the real” Pasuya Yao.
The first thing that potential voters (or more precisely, eagle-eyed netizens) noticed following the relaunch of his campaign was that Yao’s writing style had changed.
This stylistic transition led observers to speculate that the reboot of Yao’s campaign and the Facebook page that fronts it were actually executed by Yao Jen-to (姚人多) – President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) former deputy secretary-general and the newly appointed vice chairman and secretary-general of the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF).
[FULL STORY]
