‘The starting gun will soon be fired for 90 days of campaigning. In the run-up to that moment, the campaign of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has lost its footing once or twice.’
THE official start of the campaign period for national office is next week already. This is why the candidates for President, Vice President and the 12 open seats in the Senate are revving up their campaign machineries and making sure they have the networks and resources ready for the big push. It will be 90 full days (except for the Easter break) of campaign jingles, radio plugs, TV ads and social media posts — including, of course, fake news, the bane of our age.
All eyes at this stage are on Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who has been leading in almost all surveys since the filing of candidacies late last year. Marcos polls in the mid to high 40s, sometimes even in the 50s, and is considered a shoo-in unless something causes his campaign to disintegrate. For which there is always a possibility… but whether or not it is likely is debatable.
He has had some missteps of late. The first was his non-appearance at the Jessica Soho interview, perhaps a calculated risk on his part: his supporters never held it against him for skipping that, while those who brayed the most were never his supporters anyway. So better to stay away and not say something he might regret later.
He made up for that by showing up in the Boy Abunda interview, where he was obviously comfortable fielding “tough” questions from the so-called “King of Talk.” In an apparent appeal to the undecided, he tried to wrap himself in the cloak of “national unity” and then he played statesman by refusing to speak negatively of his rivals. (In contrast, VP Leni came out swinging and mincing no words.)
I am told that Sen. Marcos had said that he was not going to enforce the ruling against China in the West Philippine Sea. I didn’t actually hear him say that, but if he did that would have been unfortunate if not in fact wrong, even from a timing perspective. Then again, maybe he was making a clear play for the support of Beijing, clearly now the major foreign power that matters in our national affairs. In fact, when his Chinese New Year message featured a greeting of the Chinese people and the Chinese ambassador to the Philippines ahead of his greeting the Filipino-Chinese community (listen to it!), I smiled to myself.
This is realpolitik in the 21st Century Philippines.
There was the issue of his SALN. Social media was awash with posts quoting the senator as saying that he was not going to release his SALN as it could be used by critics to hound him. Not surprisingly, he was bashed by those who are not supporting him anyway while his backers were mainly quiet. I think a clarification was made later — saying he was perfectly willing to release his SALN. To anyone who values transparency and accountability in public office, this is the only correct answer on this matter.
And of course, the Commission on Elections. We all know how the senator skipped making an online appearance at a hearing seeking the cancellation of his certificate of candidacy, citing COVID. We all know about the brouhaha surrounding a second case whose decision remains hanging because the ponente has yet to make public the decision; in the meantime, one member has retired and another has moved to another division. We all know that all these stem from a case of failure to file tax returns, an offense that generally disqualifies the offender from running for public office. And we also know how this remains a cloud hovering above his campaign and generates so much conspiracy theories about scenarios from A to Z, some of which could see either an Imee Marcos or a Sara Duterte rising to the presidency.
