There is already a certain amount of nostalgia in the air. Although many complained of the blaring loudspeaker trucks, grumbled at campaign generated traffic jams, and jeered at overly heroic posters and overblown electioneering slogans, they also, clearly, loved the theater involved.
Nevertheless, the voters were very serious. They battled crowds and rain to hear, first hand, the interplay of election attacks and promises. You could not join such a campaign crowd without being affected. The public was delighted at the charges and countercharges and amused by the showmanship. Then, rapt expressions, in the truly solemn moments, revealed the intensity of interest in real discussions of real problems.
A number of the candidates became media stars—legislatively innovative, quick at wit, scathing in attack, masterful in debate; others became prime at tractions as almost standard entertainment figures; and still other seemed natural clowns, both comic and tragic. Very notably, movie box offices suffered across the nation.
It would be deceptively easy to write off the near-universal popularity of the campaigning to a mere desire for entertainment—easy and wrong. For truly, what most of the world has little noted—a local election season in someone else's county—has been. Here and now, another remarkable episode in the historical transition of one of the world's most ancient nations
The elections were a triumph of democracy: serious, open, free, and fair…and recognized and treated as such by most of the populace. In their aftermath, there was very little "sour grapes," or "my soccer team" mindless antagonism among the voting public. Above all, the newly elected candidates are by far the best-educated and career-qualified in the nation's history.
There is little wonder that the Kuomingtang, the political party that wrought the "economic miracle" and also took care to deeply nurture such vibrant democracy, has been rewarded by an attentive electorate with better than 70 percent of the vote and of the winning candidates.