ENDORSEMENT is endearment. In the political guru’s campaign paradigm, ACE – Awareness, Conversion, Endearment—a political candidate worth his or her salt should know where they are in the scheme of things. You’re behind the curve, riding it, or ahead of the pack.
Vice President Leni Robredo must like her chances, despite the naysayers.
More and more good people – better is perhaps the right adjective – are on the same page with her. Which means, at least, there’s hope in good governance and fight against corruption in government, a go-to campaign mantra for many, regardless of one’s political ambition in the current election fever. Healing, a doctor once said, is both a matter of time and opportunity.
Both exist simultaneously, curiously in the present electoral commotion. By her ambition alone, the only woman among the thorns in the presidential race is providing a qualitative difference that matters in the life of nation looking for some breakthrough but, ironically, largely refuses to see it’s here and now.
Has she come, providentially like Esther for the ancient Jews in her time, for such a time as this?
The Season of Lent, which has begun with the marking of an ash cross-sign on a believer’s forehead, should make the adherent of the faith recall an egregious choice – a wrong one—made a long time ago. It’s the ass-riding king or the bad ass. The choice was both tragedy and farce at the same time, borrowing from the words of Karl Marx in his cynical view of history.
Robredo must be buoyed up, both politically and personally, by the growing – and quality—of endorsement to her quest for the presidency. It’s a validation, if not a vindication, of her political crusade and philosophy, each a metaphor for either. You stop a corrupt dictator’s son from becoming president, you put a stop to historic corruption. The trend is both symbolic and substantive, too.
Logically, in a political exercise that seems to defy logic but amplify irrational noise, it should not only move the needle significantly but vastly improve her chances in a contest that surveys show, thus far, who the dominant choice is. Sad and alarming.
Endorsement is a process of evolution, according to a former American presidential wannabe Herman Cain . “ What you try to do is endorse someone you believe in and their ideas, and their solutions align with yours,” he said.
How has Robredo’s own endorsement evolution been thus far? How do I love thee, asked Elizabeth Barret Browning in her sonnet. In Robredo’s case, we can count the ways.
At least 23 former officials of former President Fidel V . Ramos have endorsed her. About 47 Cabinet officials of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo have chosen her as their candidate. Presumably, the former Cabinet members of former President Noynoy Aquino are rooting for her, despite distancing from the “dilawan” which Duterte and his paid trolls have successfully demonized. Past and present diplomats have signed up for her. Outstanding former senators, one of them a former general and a local hero in the people’s fight for democracy during the EDSA People Power in 1986, are on her side. So have hundreds of economists and a number of local politicians who fit Cain’s description of endorsers involved in the process of evolution.
On the other hand, you have two former presidents, both with legal and moral issues, both jailed for a time and subsequently released for humanitarian reason, leading the pack of dubious endorsers. A sitting president is deceptively ambiguous but let it be known that the daughter is running as the second fiddle while supporters are leaning on the dictator’s camp side. And by the way, a popular/notorious religious leader who’s been posterized as a most wanted personality in the US is among the leading endorsers.
On the one hand, shepherds and sheep of the majority religious group in the country have been warned of merchants of dreams selling the dubious Orwellian narrative of a once and future golden age. Lies, Robredo said, against which the true Church must stand. And she does. On the other, two big religious groups that mistake their politics for theology and vice versa are indifferent to the lies. You get the drift.
Weep or rejoice as the case maybe.
For, by their endorsers, you shall know them. They convey an unmistakable message of what the foreseeable future – the next six years- wlll be. The traditional Filipino mindset of fatalistic que sera sera might be loading the dice, so to speak.
Is victory possible with less impressive numbers on her side, endorsers and latest survey ratings considered? You don’t need 30,000 men to win the battle, Gideon is told in the Old Testament. Three hundred men who drank from the river markedly different from the rest of the warriors, would be enough to prevail. Character matters.
Former Sen. Serge Osmena has vowed he would be more than just an admirer and supporter. He would do more, he said, a virtual wake-up call on fellow believers. They can change the complexion of the game, with enough, if not plenty, of time to do it.
“Those whom success induces to relax their habits of care and thoughtfulness, and their willingness to encounter disagreeables (corruption, tyranny, bad governance?), seldom long retain their good fortune at its height,” the British philosopher John Mills warned. So far, that’s what the surveys seem to impart. Thus far, that’s what Leni’s endorsers want to avert.
Albay Rep. Joey Salceda, now a certified political chameleon, who once called former President Arroyo a lucky bitch — almost with affection, he later qualified – has endorsed Robredo, a kindred soul in a way, for president. He’s on the same page as she is that good government equals good economy ad infinitum. He’s now on the opposite of a former president, whom he served as chief of staff and trusted economic adviser, notwithstanding his ‘distasteful’
Freudian slip, probably because he saw that in the nine years of his former boss’ term, the poor became poorer and the rich became richer.
His endorsement is all of a piece with the growing nationwide affection—endearment, in a more passionate sense– of a widow who wants to be the next president.
