Four-corner presidential derby
looms in the May elections

by Vic Ferrer

One of these four will be president: the incumbent Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Senator Raul Roco, Actor Fernando Poe, Jr. and Senator Panfilo Lacson. Different surveys place Arroyo, Roco and Poe in the lead.

As the surveys indicate, either actor Fernando Poe Jr. or former Senator Raul S. Roco will be the next president of the country.

In a four-corner fight, according to the latest IBON survey, Poe and Roco will get 31.8 percent and 30.55 percent of the votes, respectively. There is not much difference noted in a three-corner fight [assuming that Senator Panfilo Lacson drops out of the race], with Poe and Roco receiving 35.80 percent and 35.28 percent.

Of course, surveys have two to three percent margin of error. Victory could therefore go either way for the two men.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo emerges from the surveys with a measly 12.31 percent. If she remains in contention it is because she has the support of the great majority of sitting elected officials. It is assumed that these officials would deliver the votes or, as the more cynical observers fear, steal the election for her.

On the other hand, Lacson is way down the bottom. He pins his hopes on the Supreme Court disqualifying Poe because of the citizenship issue or Poe himself deciding to discontinue his quest, realizing at last his intellectual incapacity. He assumes that those who are disenchanted with Mrs. Macapagal-Arroyo will shift their alliance to him if Poe is out of the race. The surveys do not bear out this assumption, however.

In fairness to Mrs. Macapagal-Arroyo, she works hard to break up criminal syndicates and turn the economy around. No other president has uncovered and raided illegal drug laboratories and sent their maintainers to jail, mostly Mainland and Taiwanese Chinese. She succeeds, under difficult circumstances, to attract foreign investors into the country.

Mrs. Macapagal-Arroyo won the vice-presidency in the elections that also installed actor Joseph Estrada as president. Her standard-bearer, House Speaker Jose de Venecia, lost, but the voters so enamored with her that they crossed party lines to give her more votes than the extremely popular cinema idol.

The voters are a capricious lot, however. They quickly turned against Mrs. Macapagal-Arroyo after she took over the presidency. It was partly her fault. In her desire to please everyone, she adopted policies calculated to mollify the supporters of the ousted president, who had earlier mounted an uprising to dislodge her from office and reinstall him. She offended in the process her core constituency, the so-called civil society, ironically, without winning over the masses to her side.

Mrs. Macapagal-Arroyo labors under a curse. It is a mark of distinction for the poor, who by the way constitute the great majority of the population, to regard all politicians as corrupt, but that does not prevent them from hoping that the next president would improve their lot. They hate with red-hot passion when disappointed, and all attempts to court them invariably proved futile. No Philippine president has ever won re-election, except Ferdinand E. Marcos, who accomplished the feat under duress.

The first to declare his candidacy in the coming elections, Roco is perceived as extremely competent and honest. He is the head of a successful law firm and, as Congressman and Senator, a winner of various awards from reputable organizations. As Education Secretary, he gained a reputation as graft-buster. About the only criticism against him comes from members of an entrenched syndicate in the department who resent his official act to break up the system that allows them to collect millions from schoolteachers for a fee.

Until Poe announced his candidacy, Roco always dominated the surveys. This is consistent with his past performance. In the last elections, when he first ran for the highest office of the land, he placed second to Estrada. He handily beat de Venecia despite the fact that the latter, being the administration bet, held all the government resources in his hands.

He remains a favorite among the middle-class, the professionals and businessmen. Unfortunately, their number may not be enough to turn the tide even if one throws in the ordinary workers, who prefer Roco over Poe. It is perceived that people with even a modicum of education look down at the actor, and ordinary workers are high school graduates at the very least.

As everyone knows Poe is a high school dropout. Of course, there are others who for some reason or another do not have a formal education, but Poe is a classic non-achiever. He has parlayed his Spanish-American mestizo looks into several roles in the movies, and that’s about it.

The late Senator and Foreign Secretary Blas Ople did not graduate from the secondary grades, but he was an intellectual giant. He was a fine stylist in both English and Tagalog. Inability to speak a second language could not be taken as a mark of intellectual inferiority, but Poe exhibits all traits of functional illiteracy. It is not that he cannot speak an intelligible sentence in English. He cannot even express himself well in Tagalog. One thinks with words. Therefore, a man with limited vocabulary is incapable of deep thoughts.

That hardly matters with those who marvel at his feats in the movies, where he could dispose of gangsters with his fists, defeat an army with a pistol, or send the forces of darkness to the netherworld with a sword.

Eddie Villanueva, head of Jesus Is Lord, has also filed his candidacy for the presidency. Despite his claim that the religious organization has seven million members, however, he barely escaped being labeled as a nuisance candidate. As defined by the Commission on Elections (Comelec), a nuisance candidate is one who could not mount a credible, nationwide campaign and therefore deserves to be disqualified.

In any case, his candidacy does not register a blip on the popularity screen. He stands as much chance in the coming electoral exercise as, well, a snowflake in hell.

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