ONLY Vice President Jejomar Binay can address the issue of poverty decisively among the presidential candidates, his campaign spokesman Rico Quicho said Sunday.
“Unless you have experienced poverty yourself, you can never truly understand what it means to be poor,” Quicho said in a statement.
“The Vice President grew up in poverty and only he knows how and what it means to be poor.”
Quicho said Binay was focused on one thing in this elections: eliminating poverty and helping the poor.
“This election is about poverty. The Vice President believes the Filipinos don’t deserve leaders who don’t look out for the poor when disaster strikes,” Quicho said.
“As a former human rights lawyer, he does not believe in a government that guns down poor farm workers when they cry for aid.”
Quicho said the voters should ignore candidates who utter platitudes but lack any experience or record of achievement in fighting poverty.
“We have candidates who do not understand what it means to be poor. We have candidates who are not bold enough to change the face of poverty in this country once and for all,” he said.
“Fighting poverty was what the Vice President did when he was mayor of Makati. And this is what he will continue to do when he is president.”
Quicho said Binay will leave the bickering to the other candidates while he focuses on solving poverty in the country.
“This election is about the people, not politics. About helping the poor, not the powerful,” he said.
He chided Senator Grace Poe for saying she was not an on-the-job trainee when it came to the presidency.
“With all due respect to Senator Poe, I believe it was she herself who said just a little over a year ago that she was not ready to become president,” Quicho said.
He said it was important to take Poe at her word when she said that “the presidency is not for the unprepared” and that she “still had a lot to learn.”