Exit Comrade Chung; Some Predictions
Never in Korea’s short history of electing local officials […] has a party which holds the Blue House performed so badly.
My main hope for yesterday’s election was not for a GNP victory, but for an Uri defeat. The result, which officially qualifies as a “meltdown” on the Yangban’s scorecard, has already produced a windfall that far exceeds my limited expectations: the ignominious resignation and likely political extinction of Comrade Chung Dong-Young, North Korea’s Minister-at-Large for Southern Affairs.
In the major races, the damage was bad enough “• the Grand Nationals won 12 of the 16 administrative leadership posts up for grabs; President Roh Moo-hyun’s Uri Party took one. At other levels as well, the results were stunning. In races for mayors and district heads in 230 jurisdictions, the Grand Nationals took 155 and Uri 19. The small Democratic Party, which dissidents left in 2003 to form the Uri Party, bested its breakaway rival by winning two major contests and 20 minor ones, one more than Uri claimed. In Seoul, Uri was completely shut out in balloting for district leaders; the Grand Nationals swept all 25 of those posts. . . .
The situation was no better in elections for local legislative posts. Grand Nationals outpolled their Uri rivals 557-52 for the 733 seats filled Wednesday; the Democratic Party was in second place, taking 80 of those posts. The results were bitter medicine for the party that said in 2003 that it would be a “party for the whole nation.”
There was also an upset:
The Grand Nationals’ Park Seoung-hyo won the mayoral election in Daejeon, a race that was too close to call at the deadline for yesterday’s edition of this newspaper. He bested Yum Hong-chul of the Uri Party in a race that looked like a walkover for Mr. Yum two weeks ago.
The slashing attack on Park Geun-Hye doesn’t seem to have moved the meter much; the final results were generally within five to ten of where they stood on May Day. That’s good news.
============== I’m Not Finished Hating on Comrade Chung =============
Why? Let me tell you why. First, because he sets new lows for stupidity every time he takes Kim Jong-Il’s tiny* dick out of his mouth long enough to speak. Second, he’s a plasticky demagogue who traded on the hatred of Korea’s greatest benefactor and its most prosperous and democratic neighbor. Third, he betrayed the people of North Korea to God-knows-how-many years of starvation and terror. The convincing defeat of the party that Comrade Chung led is good news for South Korea, for the United States, and above all, for the people of North Korea, for it was Comrade Chung who slammed the furnace door on them and shoveled in the coal. Please join me in dancing upon corpse from which Chung’s political soul has fled, and taking it for a couple of drags around the block. Yes, I know. In Korea, politicians never die, but there are exceptions to every law since Isaac Newton, and politicians who lead their parties to unprecedented beatings die. Especially stupid ones. He’ll try, of course, but the only way he gets to the Blue House is if the North Korean People’s Army crashes him through in the belly of a T-72 and installs him.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the extinction of Comrade Chung, the Peter Principle‘s living embodiment. Cancel the contract for all that wallet-size “Chung in “Ëœ07″ litter. Better to use it for worthier purposes: room salons and Chinese menus.
========== Roh Is Next ==========
The rest of the Uri minions seem too paralyzed by the candlepower to run from the oncoming bus. It’s not hard to see why when you ask yourself who on Korea’s political left has the stature to run for the presidency in 2007. Roh is legally barred, and he and Chung are both so damaged at this point that their proteges and associates will have to distance themselves to have any chance. That leaves exactly four options: Prime Minister Goh Kun, UniFiction Minister Lee Jong-Seok, Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon, and former Health Minister Kim Geun-Tae.
I discount Kim Geun-Tae first. He lacks the stature and charisma to be presidential candidate material. Kim would also be weighed down by his reputation as a Roh loyalist. He can run, but he can’t win.
Goh Kun has the stature and a reputation for honesty and stability, and he’s the first vulture to alight on the carrion:
In the aftermath of the massive defeat of the governing Uri Party in the local elections Wednesday, Goh Kun, former prime minister and a likely candidate for the presidential election next year, announced that in July he would form a national movement in search of a new political paradigm.
“It is not a party,” Mr. Goh said in an hour-long interview with JoongAng Ilbo at his office in Seoul yesterday. But he did not deny the possibility that the movement could develop into a political group.
I wonder where he got an idea like that.
“I will actively work to establish broad unity of reformist groups with a moderate utilitarian ideology,” he said. “Instead of allying with a particular party, I will cooperate with any person who can share the moderate utilitarian reform regardless of party affiliation or faction.”
“Compared to the past, more Grand National Party members [today] have future oriented and reformist attitudes and I can work with them,” he added.
Goh has a big problem: he has no political base, which is why he’s trying to build one. The GNP won’t take him because he was part of Roh’s government. Post-Uri won’t take him, either. Goh is a centrist whom the leftist base will never accept. Having Goh Kun on the post-Uri ticket is like having Tony Blair on the Labour ticket. It would require an embittered act of political surrender that would explode anew into factionalism when the leader found himself weakened. Such an act of ideological submission is thinkable in Britain, but it would be unprecedented in Korean politics, which seldom elects moderates to anything. It would acknowledge that Korean public opinion had moved sharply away from the left’s views. It would mean the end of everything the left holds dear: Sunshine, sticking it to Uncle Sam, and wealth redistribution. Goh Kun may end up as a kingmaker, but he the only way he’ll be president is if Roh resigns. We’ll get to that shortly.
Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon, though a logical choice, comes across as a dull, cautious, diplomatic milquetoast (think: Warren Christopher when he was still alive, which is a joke). More importantly, he seems more interested in buying his way to becoming U.N. Secretary General than taking the helm of a sinking ship, although I could be wrong about that.
This leaves only UniFiction Minister Lee Jeong Seok, a man who is simultaneously one of Uri’s brightest minds (fwiw) and one of its greatest embarrassments [three links in there]. My money is on the Lee to advance again, maybe even all the way to the top of the ticket. Lee is brash, extreme, and reckless, yet crafty. Korean politics favors that sort of person.
The party is split over what to do next.
You don’t say. Do go on.
The options being debated include the mass resignation of all the party’s leadership in an attempt to begin with a clean slate, continuing with the present leadership hierarchy or perhaps even a re-merger with the Democratic Party. All those options are controversial within the party, though, and the leadership deferred any attempt to make a decision until after the weekend.
Clean slate? Who are they going to bring in? This guy?
President Roh Moo-hyun appeared shaken by what most analysts said was a vote of no confidence in his administration.
A prediction: the odds are 50-50 that Roh will announce his resignation within the next two weeks. Make that much higher if there’s a party decision to merge Uri with the DP. This clears the decks for a new Uri leadership to take control of the government. The other alternative? A rebuked President Roh Moo-Hyun carries the ruins of his policies and the party he built around them into the next national election wearing sackcloth and ashes, which means doom for an agenda that clearly means more to Roh than clinging to an office he’s publicly toyed with resigning more than once.
I’d be remiss if I failed to mention that the left’s loss was about more than interparty migration and splits. The other southern affiliate of the Workers’ Party also took a beating:
The radical-left Democratic Labor Party was also stunned. It failed to win a single administrative leadership post anywhere in the nation. Even in labor strongholds like Ulsan, its mayoral candidate, Roh Ok-hee, won only a quarter of the votes cast; the party did not win any of the district office leader posts up for grabs there.
P.S.: The New York Times calls this “the worst election performance by any governing party in South Korean history,” and quotes experts who said that “Mr. Roh’s efforts to . . . reconcile with North Korea could lose steam. I also liked this description of the Roh era:
“The past few years under Roh’s rule was a process of demystification of the former student activists,” said Kim Soo Jin, a political science professor at in Seoul.
Much like the election of the zanies of Hamas, sometimes the only way to defeat a militant movement is to give it a shot at governing. My father says that the Arabs have a proverb, according to which if God wants to kill an ant, He gives it wings.
* In Jasper Becker’s “Rogue Regime,” a woman who was forced to service the Dear Leader quoted him as saying, “Small as a mouse’s turd, aren’t I?” We presume the response was not “yes,” or we wouldn’t have heard the story.
Pic: Joongang Ilbo, whose coverage completely outclassed the other papers today.