A day before the election, his surrogates threaten an American national, Theresa Shaheen, for offering to make clear whether Ma still has an American green card:
Theresa Shaheen, former chairwoman of the American Institute in Taiwan, is being given a…warning against getting involved in the "green card" issue over Kuomintang presidential hopeful Ma Ying-jeou.
"We wish Ms. Shaheen to know that it’s unlawful for an foreign national to get involved in an election in Taiwan," a top aide to Ma said yesterday. According to the Election Law, no foreign nationals may electioneer for a candidate in Taiwan.
Interestingly enough, the Ma campaign was more than happy enough to quote "unnamed sources in America" who said their candidate had nothing to worry about – his green card was no longer valid. But give one of those sources a verifiable name and face (along with an answer Ma doesn’t like), and suddenly his attack dogs come out snarling.
(By the way, the whole "Is Ma’s green card still valid or isn’t it?" controversy was profoundly uninteresting to me. If anything, the fact that Ma considered emigrating from Taiwan when it was still a dictatorship in the ’70s inclines me to think more, not less of him!)
UPDATE (Mar 31/08): Therese Shaheen denies the KMT story that she was ever willing to wade into the green card controversy:
In her statement, in English and Chinese, Shaheen said she was "never involved in any matters" regarding the green card issue during the presidential campaign.
"Fantastic rumors about my alleged involvement, my plans to make public statements about it, and the allegation that I was doing so because I favored one party over the other were 100 percent false," she said.
Ma’s aide said, “We wish Ms. Shaheen to know that it’s unlawful for an foreign national to get involved in an election in Taiwan. ”
Ironic..this is why we want to know if Ma is a foreign national in the first place.