Forget brinksmanship and pussyfooting or bleating protestations of innocence or tough guy talk against crime and corruption, I think 2016 will be won by the candidate who possesses brute, raw power over the emotions of the masses.
I am not a fan of Senator Grace Poe nor am I endorsing her candidacy. In fact, in previous posts on Facebook, I've already said that if the election came to a choice between Mar Roxas and Jojo Binay, I would have topic the former. Except for his temper, I think Mar is a pretty decent guy and some of the solutions to national problems when he was Trade Secretary were really clever.
I am not sure if it is the right way to say this, but instead of calling for a subsidy to bring down the price of medicines, Mar sought to use the parallel importation scheme to bring in cheaper branded medicines from India and elsewhere to compete with the same branded medicines being sold here at a higher price. That sort of impressed me a lot, back then.
Apart from this, there was the PCPS or Personal Computers for Public Schools as well as the Pisong Pandesal, the big rah-rah-rah for Small and Medium Enterprises and of course, call centers.
In 2004, Mar won with the highest number of votes for senator and I guess it was largely because of the "Hoy! Hoy! Hoy!" Mister Suave campaign.
These days, however, we're seeing a different Mar from the one I saw years and years ago. And his presumed bid for the Presidency in 2016 isn't at all the same as his 2004 bid for a seat in the senate.
During my long walks around my low income neighborhood in Sampaloc and my chismisan sessions with people about the upcoming elections, they mention lots of names except Mar's.
When I mention Binay, most of the people I talked with nodded and said they'd vote for him because they wanted to have something similar to what Makati residents got in terms of "benefits".
However, when I mention Grace Poe, almost all of the people I talked with were more emphatic in saying that they'd vote for her. When asked why, they'd say in different ways that, well, they just liked her and would vote for her for no reason at all other than she's the daughter of FPJ.
Never mind that she may have problems with her citizenship or the rumored half sister of Bongbong Marcos. Never mind that she has relatively little experience in actually holding the reins of an executive office. Never mind that she hasn't talked about platforms or programs...
Call it stupid, dumb, and idiotic... I would agree with you.
But that's what we are facing in the 2016 elections, a large voting public who will vote for Grace Poe for little or no reason at all.
And it doesn't help that one camp is bickering over control over an incipient presidential campaign while the other camp is busy fighting one fire after the other and doing everything but focus on their presidential campaign. Let's not even mention that another camp, though smaller and less glossy than the two others, is winning a steady following and eating away at whatever support the first two camps have established.
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