The use of a teleprompter in making a public address must take some getting used to. President Park Geun-hye uses a teleprompter (consisting of two transparent panels facing the speaker obliquely on the left and right) quite often and quite well. 

When the president delivered the 2014 budget address to the plenary session of the National Assembly last week, she moved her glance anxiously across the rows of lawmakers of the ruling and opposition parties, appealing for their speedy action on a host of economic and social bills. The electronic notes flashing in front of her should have helped her keep her composure.

The president promised the representatives that she would establish a new “legislative culture” by delivering the budget address to the fall session of the Assembly personally each year without delegating the function to the prime minister, as did most of her predecessors. In starting the new tradition, President Park also became the first in our parliamentary history to use a teleprompter in addressing the Assembly.

Earlier this month, while she was on a tour of Europe, Park’s aides set up a teleprompter for her on some more important occasions, such as a meeting with business leaders of France and Korea in Paris. Park certainly is most linguistically resourceful among Korea’s presidents but she is so cautious and perfectionist that she occasionally seeks electronic support when she is speaking in public, either in her mother tongue or in foreign languages.

While she was leading the then opposition Grand National Party, she earned the nickname of “pocket book princess” for her ubiquitous use of a jotter in strategic meetings with her party colleagues or making speeches to any size of audience. When Park began to use the electronic speech aid during her 2012 campaign, Internet gurus noted her modal shift “from pocket book to prompter.”

The one-time presidential challenger Ahn Cheol-soo also used a teleprompter when he announced his ambition to take the highest office in Korea in 2012. American presidents, from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama, have used the “idiot boards” with varying frequency. And there is nothing wrong with national leaders relying on an electronic cueing device to present their views and policies correctly without a slip of the tongue or getting lost in the middle of a speech. They are able to keep facing the audience without the need to consult the text on the rostrum.

However, it still is hard to get my eyes accustomed to this sight, which is essentially an act of pretense. Almost a year after the nation elected Park Geun-hye to lead the Republic of Korea, many members of the public, including this writer, feel a little hunger for the president’s natural immersion with the people whenever they look at her speaking before the teleprompter. On top of this, we realize that she has not held a press conference since her inauguration in February.

Nine months without meeting the press is undoubtedly the longest in the history of our presidential system and we do not know how much longer the record will stretch. The president has held a “gandamhoe,” an informal talk with newspaper and network editors over lunch, but no press conference yet. Even during her overseas trips, she avoided chance meetings with the accompanying press aboard the airplane. Thus, she has offered ample ground for the opposition to criticize her for a lack of communication with the people.

President Park often visits traditional markets to mingle with vendors and give them words of encouragement. In weekly meetings with the presidential staff, she delivers key policy measures and expresses her opinions on major issues. This cannot be true communication, as she just says what she wants to say without getting reactions or feedback. Senior secretaries silently writing down the gist of presidential instructions in their notebooks is not a very reassuring sight.

During the 1970s, President Park Chung-hee’s New Year press conference was a major annual event in which the authoritarian leader presented key government policies in plain language in answer to (prearranged) questions from Blue House reporters for up to two hours. In the final years of his 18-year rule, the occasion became increasingly perfunctory and offered little insight into what was ahead for the nation.

Chun Doo-hwan largely imitated his predecessor and, following the democratic reform of 1987, successive presidents showed different approaches to media relations, but presidential press conferences drew much attention as a mechanism for the leader to reach the people. The number of media representatives accredited to the Blue House press room has vastly increased, but the distance between the present holder of the highest office and the origin of her power seems greater.

What is our president afraid of to reveal what she thinks to the people? Having been elected with clear majority support and being constitutionally relieved from worrying about reelection, the president has only to speak as directed by her conscience and ideology. If she makes a gaffe or causes any misunderstanding, she can always make corrections through her able press officers. A teleprompter may reduce unease before a sizeable audience but the gadget only helps perform an act that can hardly carry the true passion of the speaker.

Over the past year or so, we have seen the president’s elegant smile every day and heard her stress “creative economy” and “trust process” in prime-time news. The time has come for the president to depart from the rather stale campaign rhetoric and explore a fresh vision for the nation to carry on until her exit in 2018. Beyond welfare, economy and security, Korea needs a leader who can stop the splitting of society into all kinds of obnoxious spectrums.

Many believed a female president can do the task better but the president has maintained her princess image under a cape of inflexibility that had characterized her as an opposition leader and more recently as an internal challenger in the ruling camp. And she has yet to let us hear her real voice.

Whether in the left or right, people want the president to speak her mind honestly, naturally and directly to them.

By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik, a former managing editor of The Korea Times, wrote editorials for The Korea Herald between 1998 and 2012. ― Ed.