Park, Moon fight on for undecided

Conservative ruling party candidate Park Geun-hye and opposition challenger Moon Jae-in were in the thick of frantic campaigning, Monday, making closing arguments to a closely divided Korean electorate ahead of Wednesday’s vote.

Park, the daughter of the late military strongman Park Chung-hee and representing the Saenuri Party’s hopes of retaining Cheong Wa Dae, sought to generate strong turnout from supporters. Moon, the Democratic United Party (DUP) nominee, focused predominantly on swaying independent voters to his side. Polls conducted through Dec. 12, the deadline for publicizing surveys, indicated a deadlocked race nationally.

The competition between the two familiar adversaries continued to be ill-tempered with them exchanging personal attacks and accusations of unlawful campaign activities, picking up where they left off on their final presidential debate Sunday night.

Park stumped in the central region in the morning before heading back to the Seoul metropolitan area, home to nearly half of the country’s eligible voters, urging people to stick with her and her promise to rebuild the economy and the middle class. Moon also spent most of his time in Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi Province towns, shadowed by his campaign partner and former independent candidate Ahn Cheol-soo.

Following her comments on national television the previous night, Park accused her opponent of manipulating the media and abusing the rights of a National Intelligence Service (NIS) employee, who the DUP claimed was part of a conspiracy to reshape online opinions in favor of Park.

After questioning the 28-year-old NIS agent and investigating her personal computer, police announced they found no evidence to back the DUP allegations that she wrote numerous comments on Internet message boards under dozens of names. However, Moon’s camp questioned why police were studying a hard disk instead of Internet servers.

“The DUP still refuses to apologize or comment about its abuse of the rights of a poor, innocent woman,’’ Park said at a rally in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province.

“The party raised unfounded allegations that the NIS was employing a team of 70 employees to unlawfully maneuver political opinions on the Internet and took a herd of media members to the house of the female NIS agent. The police investigated her computer and failed to find evidence that she wrote even a single comment.’’

Park portrayed Moon as repackaging old ideas of his political mentor Roh Moo-hyun, the former president who left behind a sharply polarized legacy when leaping to his death in 2009, putting the nation at risk of hyper-partisanship in face of economic sluggishness. She also accused him of shifting positions on North Korea-related issues that would undermine the country’s stability at home and its security abroad.

“The DUP and candidate Moon blame the recent rocket launch by North Korea as a result of the ineptitude of the current government on national security issues and claims I should share the responsibility as the head of the ruling party. Well, North Korea’s first nuclear test and the firing of the Taepodong 2 missile happened during the Roh government,’’ she said.

“Moon is also rejecting the public demands for releasing the transcript of the 2007 talk between Roh and then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, where Roh is said to have promised to compromise our claims over the Northern Limit Line (NLL). People have the right to know.’’

The NLL refers to the de facto maritime border between South and North Korea.

Moon painted Wednesday’s vote as a choice between policies capable of moving the country out of the depths of the economic ugliness and ones that got it into one in the first place. Worsening global conditions have badly exposed the country as a one-trick export pony and critics claim the erosion in household finance, and massive gulf between the rich and poor have removed an important recovery route for the economy.

On the controversy over the NIS employee, Moon claimed that the results of the police investigation left more questions than answers and raised suspicions on why the announcement was made just an hour after the television debate. The timing of the news conference came as a surprise to reporters as the police had previously said the investigation would likely extend beyond polling day.

“The Saenuri Party, alarmed after suddenly feeling they are losing the race, has been orchestrating large political maneuvers. One is the NIS employee case and the other is rumor-mongering over the NLL,’’ Moon told a crowd in Incheon.

“I was the person that reviewed the transcripts of the meeting for the last time and left it as government data that could be used critically in future talks with North Korea. I made a promise from the start that if there was any content related to Roh talking about giving up our right on the NLL or compromising it, I would bear the responsibility. I wouldn’t have said that if I wasn’t confident.’’

Aside of the controversy over the NIS employee, Moon also reminded voters that Park’s camp is facing investigation by prosecutors after the National Election Commission (NEC) discovered an unlawful secret team dedicated to writing and spreading damaging posts about Moon on Twitter. The Election Law forbids political parties from conducting campaign activities in locations not registered with the NEC.

The DUP raised fresh claims that the eight-man social media team, led by a Christian minister, Yoon Jung-hoon, took direct orders from Park’s senior aides and its activities were financed not only by the Saenuri Party, but also the NIS.

“ The Lee Myung-bak government is doing all it can to help Park win the election,’’ said DUP lawmaker Chung Se-kyun, one of Moon’s senior campaign strategists.

Park had been favored for months to claim the country’s most powerful office. However the outcome is now more unpredictable after Moon received an enthusiasm bump after Ahn, who withdrew from the race after failing to merge candidacies with Moon, decided to join his campaign trail earlier this month.

The vote could be determined by which camp did a better job of persuading undecided voters, believed to account for 10 to 15 percent of the electorate. Campaign officials of Moon believe that his spirited performance in the last debate moved more swing voters to his side.

However, it remains to be seen whether the toxic war of words created by allegations of dirty campaigning will lure more swing voters to the ballot boxes, as Moon’s camp hopes, or rather isolate them.

An Internet company official, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, said that if the NIS employee did leave comments detrimental to Moon on websites, the records would be left in the servers, not the hard disk of her computer.

Police in southern Seoul confirmed they made no inquiries to Internet companies for server data and claimed they didn’t have a strong enough case to push for a mandatory investigation.

Park plans to spend the final day of campaigning Tuesday barnstorming from Busan to Seoul, while Moon will be moving in the opposite direction from Seoul to Busan. <The Korea Times/Kim Tong-hyung>