“I am the one who needs to change the most,” President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) wrote on Facebook on Nov. 25, one day after she stepped down as Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairperson following the party’s electoral losses. Regrettably, the events of the past three weeks suggest that more thorough introspection is needed by Tsai, who apparently has yet to grasp why voters turned their backs on the DPP on Nov. 24.
Case in point one: Tsai has launched so-called “hallway chats,” addressing the media in a hallway of the Presidential Office Building — an idea clearly inspired by US president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” and styled after the press talks US presidents give in the corridors of the White House.