"One has significantly heavier baggage than the other ever did."
Although former Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his supporters have taken pains to frame his 2022 presidential candidacy not as a Marcos restoration but in I-didn’t-know-what-was-happening terms, it is both instructive and useful to compare the circumstances surrounding Ferdinand E. Marcos’ 1965 presidential candidacy with the current presidential run—still uncertain at this point because of the pending disqualification cases against him—of his son.
In 1964, then-Senate President Ferdinand E. Marcos had everything going in favor of his candidacy for the presidency as the standard-bearer of the Nacionalista Party. Everything, that is, except the wouldn’t-go-away public perception that he was wrongly acquitted of the assassination of Assemblyman Julio Nalundasan, his father’s political rival.
The man who went to the presidential hustings in 1965 was brilliant — he had reviewed for the 1939 Bar examinations, which he topped, while under detention for the Nalundasan killing. He was articulate, and he had a creditable record as a representative, senator, and Senate president. It certainly did not hurt that he had married one of the most beautiful Filipinas of the day, former Miss Manila candidate Imelda Romualdez.
The 1965 election was held at a time when the bloom had worn off the presidency of Diosdado Macapagal and talk of ineffectiveness and inefficiency increasingly filled the air. Fully supported by a party led by respected national leaders — including Gil Puyat, Arturo Tolentino, and Lorenzo Sumulong — and campaigning under a “Make The Nation Great Again” slogan, Ferdinand E. Marcos captured the imagination of enough Filipinos to beat the opponent thought to be unbeatable because of an incumbent’s built-in advantage.
Apart from the Nalundasan stigma, Ferdinand E. Marcos went into the 1965 presidential campaign with little personal baggage. In contrast, the younger Marcos will face the electorate next year with an overflow of baggage, most of them heavy.
For starters, there is his intellectual capability, True, BBM is not without articulateness, but intellectually he is a far cry from his father. One strains to catch something, anything, said by BBM that is impressive or memorable. But one strains in vain.
Another heavy baggage is BBM’s record of lying. A good rule, if a person has to lie, is to tell lies that will be difficult or impossible to disprove. But BBM has been lying brazenly about many things. He has over the years lied scandalously about his education — about receiving degrees from Oxford University in particular. The worst part of it all is that he has not disowned the lies.
Additional heavy campaign baggage is Ferdinand Junior’s claim that he is not at all aware of anything during his father’s dictatorial regime. All that anyone has to do to disprove this — and BBM’s opponents will surely continually do so– is to flash a picture, taken in the morning of Feb. 25, 1986, of a grown BBM clad in military fatigues and standing on a Malacañang balcony as his sick and beleaguered father took an oath as president of the Philippines. A man in his 20s does not know what is going on around him?
But the heaviest baggage of all — baggage with a capital B — is BBM’s claim that he and his family took absolutely no money from the nation’s coffers during their stay in power. A number of court decisions and foreign government actions have declared the Marcos family’s foreign deposits — including some made under acknowledged Marcos family foundations — to be ill-gotten and belonging to the Filipino people.
It is truly amazing how BBM can say, without batting an eyelash, that his family did nothing corrupt during his father’s two-decades-long presidency.
Indeed, circumstances have changed during the 56 years since the first Marcos presidential candidacy. And the changes have not been favorable for the current Marcos candidate. Ferdinand E. Marcos did not have to carry the exceedingly heavy baggage that his son and namesake will have to try and bring across the 2022 election finish line.