“The President mumbles words without understanding them.”
Many people cannot understand what President Duterte is talking about. It seems he is mumbling words without understanding anything he is saying. He said his daughter, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio, is ahead of Ferdinand Bongbong (BBM) Marcos, Jr. by 4 percent, she having earned 27 percent of the latest poll survey while BBM only obtained 23 percent. Seemingly dazed and without logic, Digong suggested that his daughter should not have acceded to the clamor to slide down as vice presidential candidate and reserved for him the position.
The President was furious not because Sara did not reserve a slot for him. Sara’s decision to run for vice president is to avoid seeing her father pitted against her. But as said, nobody can read what’s in the mind of the President.
Now that Digong is running for senator, he might just get the biggest surprise in life by not topping the senatorial race. This is a strong possibility for it appears Bong Go obtained barely 10 percent in the poll survey from among the six presidential candidates. If Bong Go has a very low rating, his presidential ambition is more of a pipedream, and chances are his senatorial candidates lead by Duterte would have difficulty getting the number one slot. This is not difficult to infer. His decision to be the running mate of Bong Go is the one to pull down his rating.
As what happened, it was President Duterte’s decision that Bong Go run for president. The President said he cannot support BBM’s candidacy. Of course, there is no law that will prevent him from running against his own daughter but definitely, the electorate will feel askance seeing the father and the daughter slugging it out for the same position. It is as if the more than 100 million Filipinos ran out of choices for the number two position.
The President then blurted, to quote: “it would have been better if Sara picked Bong Go as her running mate.” But Sara wanted to avoid displeasure from the voting public. She wanted to free herself from being looked upon as another subaltern. More than that, Sara, being a lawyer, refuses to be the running mate of Bong Go, knowing that she is more popular than the choice of her father. As one would quip, it is some kind of pre-nuptial arrangement being made by Duterte.
Frankly, the strategy of Digong was to reduce the supporters of BBM by endorsing Bong Go as his candidate for president. The president knows that his subaltern has a very low rating, and by any stretch of one’s imagination, it would take a miracle for the followers of Bong Go to pull down BBM’s followers to prevent his anticipated victory. The psychology of voters is to vote for the next likely winner if his first choice will not make it. This explains why Digong is mad because the BBM-Sara tandem visibly reduced his political clout as political kingmaker.
Rather, the BBM-Sara tandem bolstered the chances of the two to make a clean sweep together with their senatorial candidates lucky enough to stick with them. Even the Filipino-Chinese community, which is known to be astute in selecting their choice of candidates, has their reservation for Bong Go. They believe the senator is not popular enough to vie for the position. He needs more experience and political maturity. He is now seen as a man in a hurry to be entrusted with the most delicate power to govern. Knowing that, the electorate will not allow anybody to make a monkey of their next president.
It was the President who spoke on several occasions that he hates seeing the oligarchs playing the role of political kingmakers in this country. Now, it seems, he will be the first to violate his own rule. Besides, sensible voters see Bong Go as spineless, something many see as dangerous to be entrusted to a kind of person to make decisions for the state.
Even foreign investors and businessmen are wary of him. China, for instance, wants continuity and stability. They could sense that if Bong Co wins, there will be political backlash because the local “Amboys” will exploit the issue of Sinophobic and racism and that could be pretty dangerous as it could affect China’s multi-billion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative. It could also possibly affect our firmness to identify our economic and growth with RCEP which we lately endorsed.
Once Digong steps down from power, he will realize his magic wand will go with him. He never learned that politics is dynamic, that voters are fickle-minded and are likely to be corrupted and deceived. Otherwise, there will be no change in government. China itself experienced change and now President Xi Jinping has opened up. Even the political arrangement that Digong wants for Sara could not alter the outcome of politics.
It was Leni Robredo who made herself so unpopular. The brazen electoral fraud is a circumstance our people will never forget. She has to face possible defeat. The issues that made her unpopular are being pursued by her with relentless perseverance, and represents the corrupt institutions our people are about to ditch. Robredo refuses to make adjustments to the changing times. As the Marxist themselves would put it, “most of the politicians are products of an old system about to be discarded.” Paradoxically, Duterte became so popular during his time because he dared to challenge the stereotype and the orthodoxy that enslaved the mind of our people for more than a century.
For one, it is better for the Church to stay neutral and accept the clamor for Church and State separation. The issue against the Church has nothing to do with their doctrinal faith but a demand for their due share in government to allow their institution to flourish. It is a demand from the greedy oligarchy to contribute more to the coffers to lessen the gap of inequality; that the US has to accept that its status as a unipolar power is now a fading historical past it must learn to accept by accommodating others; the communist must make adjustment to their ideological bigotry that the world is no longer living in the Cold War era, and the changes in Russia and China are testaments to this; and that politicians like Robredo must accept that geographically, changes are taking place.
All these now contradict the bluff of Digong. The accusation on BBM as a pro-communist was something of a wild punch or off-the-cuff that instead made him so ridiculous. Remember, it was Duterte who in the early years of his presidency aligned himself with the communists, hoping to ingratiate their loyalty. But loyalty has never been a virtue of the communists.
When Duterte said that, all including the communists themselves uncontrollably laughed with many shaking their heads whether the President went snap. He was even worse than Marcos who today is being blamed for imposing martial law and incarcerated his former professor, Jose Ma. Sison, now gallivanting in the Netherlands.
As if to prove his decisiveness, Digong immediately appointed three communists to the level of cabinet members. Among them were Judy Taguiwalo to the position of social welfare secretary, Rafael Mariano as agrarian reform secretary and Liza Maza to the post of National Anti-Poverty Commission. There were other communists who became close to him and were rewarded with juicy positions. Leoncio Ibasco, Emmanuel Piñol, Ismael Sueno and Silvestre Bello to the position of secretary of labor and Employment. All these were rumored to be either members of the National Democratic Front or communist sympathizers, and remain in office to this day.