Asians give Republican Dole landslide victory

Our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin imagines how Asians would vote if they were to be enfranchised in the American presidential election. This article is a combination of fact, fiction and speculation, with the reader having to decide which is which.

HONG KONG (JP): As all Asians voted in the U.S. election tomorrow, it was a landslide for the Republican candidate Robert Dole.

The Chinese communists, never inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth, without any doubt sided with Bill Clinton. President Jiang Zemin desperately wants a summit in the U.S. to legitimize his leadership before next year's party congress. Bill Clinton will be sure to give him one.

Ordinary Chinese in their millions, on the other hand, know a thing or two about power politics. Since it was a secret ballot, they voted for Dole in the hope that he would know better how to utilize U.S. clout, and how to pressure their government to be less repressive.

North Korean communists, who have got their gift horse (in the form of two free higher-technology nuclear reactors from the U.S.), already locked in the stable, for once saw eye-to-eye with their Chinese comrades. Ordinary North Koreans, of course, did not go to the polls since they do not even know that an American election was going on -- just as they have not yet been told that man landed on the moon nearly 30 years ago.

South Koreans, from President Kim Young Sam downwards, went for Dole in a big way. They were thoroughly fed up with the Clinton Administration's penchant for appeasement of North Korea. On Clinton's watch, the instrument which has kept the peace on the Korean peninsula, the Armistice signed in 1953, has been steadily demolished by the North without the U.S. fiercely protesting every inch of the way. The Koreans generally ignored the fact that they should have been protesting about this, to the U.S., more loudly themselves.

With the memory still fresh of Secretary Warren Christopher urging both Koreas to "show restraint" after a North Korean submarine had landed infiltrators in South Korea, it was a landslide for Dole. Bill Clinton had never found time to condemn the North Korean incursion.

Once the Dole victory was certain, President Kim quietly rescinded the confidential circular which he had sent earlier to all the leading chaebols. This had promised legal immunity in return for any information from any South Korean businessmen who had given illegal contributions to the Clinton reelection campaign.

Japan went for Dole, too, but it was a close call. A relatively young and handsome leader like Clinton exercises a certain mesmerizing appeal to young Japanese voters, inured as they are to older inarticulate leaders with dour countenances. But widespread respect for age helped 73-year-old Dole, still young by Japanese political standards.

Much more important, the Japanese bureaucracy had carefully done its sums, and had concluded that, for the national interest of Japan, Bob Dole was the better bet. This decision first percolated to the politicians, and then on down to the people. Clinton's charm then only secured him a very small proportion of the Japanese vote.

The Taiwan leadership had determined early on that a large turnout for Dole was utterly essential. The grounds for this decision were inevitably self-serving. Were Bill Clinton to get a second term, it was certain that the American press and the Republicans in Congress would spend a fair proportion of the next four years examining the money politics of the Taiwan lobby in the United States. A victory for Dole avoids such embarrassment.

The Taiwan electorate was inclined to go for Clinton, since he did at least send two aircraft carriers when the island was under threat from China. Now that they realize how much it cost them in donations to the Democratic National Committee, they are not so sure. After all, Dole might have sent the carriers without hesitation and as a matter of principle. Dole is more likely to make sure that there are still plenty of carriers, and other surface combatants, in the U.S. Navy well into the 21st century.

The largest ASEAN country, Indonesia, went heavily for Dole for the same reason as the Taiwanese. Jakarta does not want Indonesian-American relations dragged through the mud of endless American muck-raking journalism, seeking to uncover Clinton's real fund-raising record since the Indonesian Riady family first arrived in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1970s.

Malaysians and Singaporeans were told to vote for Clinton because his policy of "constructive engagement" with China and North Korea helped to fully justify ASEAN's policy of "constructive engagement" with the Myanmarese military dictatorship.

Philippine President Fidel Ramos advocated a vote for Dole for the unspoken reason that Dole's mentor, former president Richard Nixon, had supported former president Ferdinand Marcos when he extended his term of office past the constitutional limit.

But overall, democrats in the Philippines and Thailand were so busy energetically debating all the issues that no clear conclusion was reached as to who was the best candidate.

As India voted heavily for Dole, it was suddenly realized by pundits that the old sentimental attachment of Indians to Democratic candidates in the U.S. had disappeared along with the old electoral dominance of the Congress Party.

After all, the last Democrat president to win a second term in the White House was Franklin D. Roosevelt, a staunch advocate of Indian independence.

But now Indians switched to voting for the Republicans for another nationalist reason: they were fed up with a Clinton administration which had to be reminded by leaks from the U.S. intelligence community about China's nuclear and missile aid for Pakistan.

Indians were even more fed up with Clinton officials first blaming the leaker -- and then always making excuses for China. With Dole, it was hoped, there would be no need for leaks since, as president, he would be more inclined to act on the basis of intelligence.

Overall, the Indian vote for Dole reflected the Asia-wide trend -- Dole's stress on "duty, honor, country" resonated in numerous and different ways in many Asian cultures.

Clinton's reelection bid, on the other hand, reminded too many Asian voters of that reality which is still the curse of the continent: the politician who will do, or say, anything to get power but knows not what to do when he gets it.

As Singapore's paramount leader Lee Kuan Yew reportedly said off-the-record to a close aide, "I simply cannot understand how a man, like Clinton, can be so knowledgeable about politics and policy, and yet be utterly devoid of any meaningful sense of strategy".