We haven’t had much difficulty with the first two in our series of Presidentiables profiles because both their websites provided us with all the information we needed to condense it in a form which makes it easier for readers to process the highlights of their background, experience and governance platform.
In the case of Sen. Panfilo Lacson, his website is complete and replete with all this accomplishments in his more than five decades of public service since his graduation from the Philippine Military Academy.
Former Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was the same except for his governance platform, which is still to be made public. The delay may be due to the fact that his pairing with Mayor Sara Duterte was finalized only in November, they do not belong to the same party and it is only now that they are working together as a team. In which case, we found it prudent to use the appearance of Sen. Marcos in the Go Negosyo forum, Kandidatalks, as the basis for his profile since most of the subjects were related to his stand on key issues which substitutes for his campaign platform.
In the case of Vice-President Maria Leonor Robredo, what we found at her website was limited to her Kalayaan sa Covid Plan. It would appear that her platform’s linchpin is still pandemic response. There wasn’t even any information about her personal background, education and professional experience. These we found on her Wikipedia page, whose link is found above for our readers.
In the interest of objectivity, we also watched her appearance on Kandidatalks but the feature on her was much shorter compared to Sen. Marcos and it was again about her Kalayaan sa Covid platform. We found this odd considering she has been Vice-President for the past five years. As such, she should have an idea of what has been lacking in the Duterte administration’s performance, considering that she has spent the greater majority of her term as the government’s main critic despite her actually being part of the same government and would be in the best position to plug the gaps and be actually one of the better-prepared candidates.
We don’t think our readers will disagree that what that Vice-President has been running is a campaign that is more on gimmickry and less on substance. It has been the pattern which been evident at the Office of the Vice-President with its various events under the umbrella of her Angat-Buhay program.
As the objective public will note, most of the Angat-Buhay programs are not scaleable. They are more like PR events with the goal of improving the Vice-President’s public image. One excellent example is the Vaccine Express. It makes use of vaccines provided to the local government units by the national government. The OVP just provides additional personnel, tarpaulins and the Vice-President graces the event for the photo-opportunity.
To our mind, the Vice-President’s Presidential candidacy is focused on preventing the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte as President and Vice-President and nothing else. In their echo chamber, the rebranded Kakampinks believe that they are the good as opposed to the evil that the Marcos-Duterte combine represent. This was the same narrative back in the 1986 snap election, when then plain housewife Cory Aquino, faced-off against the dictator Marcos. This was what Robredo stated in her speech last October 8, when she formally declared that she was running for President, where she likened the country to a battered woman, suffering from Stockholm syndrome and couldn’t break free from her abusive husband. The country’s economy has been ravaged by the disruption caused by the pandemic and yet the Vice-President is more concerned about one individual and his family over the collective plight of more than 100M Filipinos?
Dan Steinbock writes in the Manila Times about the Liberal Party, “After their electoral meltdown in 2016, the Liberals no longer enjoy the support of the Filipino majority. But the LP is supported by the country’s economic elite. In the coming months, the Liberal interests are likely to do what they can to destabilize the Marcos-Duterte lead and comparable alternatives.
They abhor the reality that China has become the Philippines’ largest trading partner, the second-largest foreign investor and the second-largest source of foreign tourists. So, they seek a return to the pre-Duterte status quo, by any means available.
During its three-decade reign until 2016, the LP failed to initiate Philippine modernization. Every fourth Filipino lived in poverty and the gap between the rich and the poor remained steep. Even today, the top-10 percent elite controls some 46 percent of the national income, in which the bottom half have a share of less than 15 percent.
Ironically, relative to other emerging Asean economies, the elite share soared with the 1986 People Power Revolution. In just a decade, it peaked at almost 55 percent of the economy until the 1997 Asian crisis, when it exceeded that of Myanmar. As the dominance has gradually fallen, inequality in Lao and Indonesia has risen above that in the Philippines.”
It can’t be said that the above can’t be attributed to the Yellows considering they were in power for thirty years as either Lakas-CMD or the Liberal Party when Benigno Aquino III came to power in 2010. The absence of a well-defined campaign platform only serves to confirm Steinibock’s assertion that the Liberals only want to get back in power with the same agenda as they had when they ousted Marcos in 1986.
Steinbock’s worst case scenario is a failure of elecitons given “the Comelec’s reliance on Smartmatic technology, which has been linked with a set of international political controversies and US-based Pro V&V Inc. holding the “source code review” of software to be used in the 2022 elections.
Pro V&V is accredited by the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC), which itself has been criticized for succumbing to political pressure in the Bush era and the Trump years, when critics thought the troubled EAC “could undermine the effort to safeguard the 2020 presidential contest from foreign meddling.””
It is well-documented that the parent company of Smartmatic played a major role in the general election in the US in 2020 which resulted in defeat of Donald Trump by Joe Biden. The “victory” of Leni Robredo over Bongbong Marcos in 2016 is still fresh in the minds of Filipinos who believe that Marcos won that contest. Up to today, Robredo can’t find the voter base which won her the Vice-Presidency.
Whether the Vice-President cares to admit it or not, she is perceived to be the US candidate what with her being backed by former Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert Del Rosario and Fil-Am heiress Loida Nicolas Lewis, who are identified with top Democratic Party leaders in New York such as former Secretary of State and New York Senator, Hillary Clinton.
Manolo Quezon writes about Manchurian candidates and has identified Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as China’s bet. It is safe to say that the country’s former colonial master has theirs in Maria Leonor Gerona Robredo.
The Kakampink strategy is anchored on getting the votes of a a youthful Filipino population. The 21 – 45 demographic will be 40M strong come May 2022. The illusion being created is the Pink Revolution will be for Robredo, to what the Yellow Revolution was for Cory, in 1986. This belief is strengthened by the open rift between the President and his daughter, which has left the administration without a standard-bearer whom the President would anoint as his successor.
But there is growing backlash for Robredo and her supporters given their high-handed attitude to those who don’t share their opinion, particularly for Filipinos who are pro-Duterte and pro-Marcos. Robredo is preaching unity but this is mostly lip service as her the pro-Robredo crowd has been very active in bashing her other rivals, such as Sen. Panfilo Lacson, Isko Moreno and Manny Pacquiao, all of whom are lumped together as Duterte-enablers.
The problem with Robredo also is she reinforces the mendicant mindset of the Filipino in addition to condoning mediocrity which she best exemplifies. The Office of the Vice-President has been described as the “little office that could” given its limited budget, but close to a billion pesos a year is not little. To give a basis for comparison, the budget of a local city university with 8,000 students is about P130M per annum. The OVP functions more as a conduit for donations through its Angat-Buhay program thought Robredo’s team would like for the public to see it as separate from the government even if Robredo is actually the second-highest ranking office in the Executive Branch.
No less than Manolo Quezon has also criticized Robredo and indirectly, her campaingn manager, Bam Aquino, for focusing more on gimmickry at a time when Marcos Jr., has taken a commanding lead over her in the surveys.
The hadouken/kame wave fiasco was soon followed by the lugaw packets yesterday, which was supposedly the overzealous effort of a supporter. It was supposed to feed 3 – 4 persons but you be the judge.
What is obvious is the now rebranded Dilawans haven’t learned from their mistakes from 2016 and 2019 or they just refuse to because they believe that they are in the right and voters are in the wrong.
The logical conclusion to this is the result will be the same in 2022. Unless god or Uncle Sam intervenes.
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