Stuart Wolfendale

The Chief Executive, Donald Tsang Yam-kuen visited his newly opened campaign office on Monday and got a shock. His candidacy for the 2008 United States presidential election had been announced.   

‘All those sudden declarations of intent by the candidates over in the States last week sort of flustered the staff here. They thought they had missed something’, said campaign manager Adolf Hsu Hsung.‘It is a quite understandable mistake to have made, after all.’ he continued. ‘The American president is voted in by an Electoral College just like the Chief Executive is. In fact there are only 538 electors for the whole of the United States compared to 800 just for us which suggests that Hong Kong should have fewer of them rather than more, don’t you think? As with us too, the candidate who wins is not always the one who got most of the popular votes or, in our case, would have got most of the popular votes.

‘Our staff was also thrown by the familiar sound of a noisy woman announcing her intentions. Actually we have two of them in Hong Kong if you count Regina Ip. Then there were the pictures of the executive mansion in an off-white, just like ours and all this talk about a leader, removed from the yobbish assembly, surrounded by men of his own choosing who gave him aggressive advice

‘What did it was that Brownback fellow, another commited Christian, announcing his candidacy. That really flustered Fanny, our clerk cum PA cum telephonist. There’s a $9 million cap on what we can spend on the campaign and the minimum wage isn’t what it used to be so, what can you do? Anyway, Fanny was very worried that she had missed some sort of deadline and, with our three staff members headed by David Li out to lunch with their mobiles switched off, she shot off an e-mail to the wire services.’

The announcement went little noticed in the States where large numbers of people in and out of their minds regularly announce their intention to run for president or run over the president. One journalist who picked it up was Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. “What I really picked up was myself off the floor laughing.” commented Friedman, ‘but, come to think of it, Mr Zing (sic), as an ethnic minority candidate, would have been in with a chance now we have that half white, rich Harvard guy from Hawaii running as first black president. And what with the bow tie and the natty suits, sartorially we would have been back to Adlai Stevenson”

“We did notice the erroneous announcement.” said a spokesman for Xinhua on condition of anonymity under the rule that the disclosure of anything about anything brought life imprisonment. “We have no comment on the implications of Tsang Yam-kuen becoming President of the United States except to say that getting our hands on the US 7^th Fleet would have come in very handy.” ‘

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