Manolo Quezon is #TheExplainer Newsletter - Issue #23 (Electoral Merry-Go-Round resumes)
Electoral Merry-Go-Round resumes today. You can catch up with previous Electoral Merry-Go-Rounds: June 7, June 14, June 21, June 28, July 5.
Lockdown Resumes
Today's paper reports a government effort to stave off a Metro Manila exodus by limiting travel in and out of the National Capital Region ahead of the actual lockdown at the end of the week. It means a three-week hiatus in pre-campaign campaigning.
Electoral Merry-Go-Round: Expulsion Edition
Ahead of the President's final State of the Nation Address (which I covered in my last newsletter), he and his people tidied up party matters by the President taking the lead in the expulsion proceedings against Senator Manny Pacquiao and former Senator Kokoy Pimentel.
The President presiding at the explusion proceedings reminded everyone who's the boss in the erstwhile ruling party, while his dangling, at the time, his possible bid for the vice-presidency helped to reassure all who stand to be co-indicted with him, as well as to keep him relevant by not becoming, immediately anyway, a lame duck.
The President, in these lean times, also remined everyone who really wields the power of the purse.
The roster of "new" officers is a mix of steady Duterte allies and reliable Arroyo veterans.
The President's pitch
What the President revealed wasn’t a confession of motivation but instead, the launching of a campaign pitch and message. He is both calling in his chips and appealing to his base for loyalty and protection. It’s potentially a powerful combination. He always made the cornerstone of his policy of liquidations, a grand bargain. He would assume all legal, moral, and political responsibility for casualties in the so-called War on Drugs provided his rules were followed.
He has been consistent and relentless on that score. To his supporters he is reminding them of one of their hidden fears: that under a new regime the liquidations might end and spark a resurgence of the behavior his constituency wanted eliminated at all costs. Then there is the other fear, of unleashing a cycle of revenge or a policy of investigations and prosecutions: were the President to be handed over for prosecution it might provoke open season at home. And then there is the horrifying but potentially powerful image of the President being “sacrificed” as a poor repayment of his leadership: so the appeal is from a martyr to be spared martyrdom and disgrace; a powerful motivation for an enraged and indignant faithful to elect him to another position. It also points to the attack against anyone opposing his campaign.
They only have to point to the coverage and comments on his PDP-Laban remarks to spin it as premature celebration by the forces The Great Eagle Father had tried to conquer. While we don’t know if this message will work, it may be enough for now.
Coalition-building department
Something to analyze. List of 15 PDP-Laban governors supporting veep bid for President. Contrast this with a map of 41 (out of 81) provinces with PDP-Laban governors (as of 2019 midterms). Generously, that's 18% of currently-held governorships. Seems surprisingly small, but some of these provinces are among the most vote-rich, if one assumes governors can deliver votes wholesale.
Additional note on coalitions
The Lacson-Sotto tandem has proven quite slick in
July 27: A bit of a stir when the Commission on Elections announced the lowest calculated logistics bid and it turned out the qualifying company is closely associated with businessman Dennis Uy, who is considered among the closest to the President.
July 28 saw a ruckus in opposition circles as word of the Vice-President meeting Lacson got out. Former Senator Trillanes, for one, objected strenuously.
July 29, Senator Panfilo Lacson Jr. has found a party to adopt him: but it had to be revived first. The party is Reporma of Gen. Renato de Villa; interesting that its leadership now includes former Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez.
Senate President Vicente Sotto III has a photo op with his NPC partymates, saying the party supports his vice-presidential bid and is open to an alliance with Sotto's running mate, Senator Panfilo Lacson Jr.
On the same day, former Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. says his mind is still open to every possibility about a potential candidacy.
A july 31 commentary by veteran journalist Vergel Santos bears reading, in light of the July 28 ruckus over the Vice-President meeting Lacson. The next section, in turn, takes a cue from this commentary.
[Newspoint] Secret talks — www.rappler.com
It shouldn’t be difficult to draw the battle lines in today’s politics. The battle is moral, between good and bad. It is also existential: In the words of Leni Robredo, the marginalized and defunded vice president, “We cannot afford another six years of this [Duterte regime].”
The portents in those words have become direr and direr with every indication that Duterte is intent on perpetuating himself in power, certainly not out of any principles – murder, corruption, and repression are, after all, the hallmarks of his regime – or any patriotic sense – hasn’t he given away our rich and strategic territorial western sea? Plainly, he would not be brought to account.
Given those stark and pressing realities, there would seem little space, if at all, for any decent compromise, and that’s precisely the reason furor has greeted Robredo’s meeting with Senators Ping Lacson and Dick Gordon. That the meeting took place on her initiative, as the senators have been quick to reveal, makes it even more rankling.
Making a big thing of that circumstance suits Lacson and Gordon for sure. They have been, as their voting records in the Senate show, staunch Duterte partisans, although, as Duterte’s unrenewable term draws to a close, they have become circumspect in their relationship with him. Their own electoral mandates due for renewal – Lacson has declared he’s running for president, but apparently more as bargaining tactic than anything else – they only stand to gain, as Robredo herself likely stands to lose, from whatever association they have with her.
Both have enough long-possessed qualities to make them, with little help from Duterte, an ill fit with Robredo. Lacson being a martial-law enforcer under Ferdinand Marcos, it’s not difficult to conceive his forceful sponsorship of a law that punishes, in draconian and arbitrary ways, a crime it cannot even define. Now the Anti-Terrorism Act serves as a pretext for tagging Duterte enemies as communists or plotters or both and for cracking down on them. Neither was it much of a surprise that, indicted once for murder, he ran and hid, resurfacing only after the coast had been cleared for him, 14 months later. That he has undertaken some bold reform effort, notably against the pork barrel, in fact putting his money where his mouth is by taking none of it for himself, may be a redeeming point. But does that make for enough saving grace?
As for Gordon, he has tried to ingratiate himself with just about every sitting president, but perhaps most obsequiously and profitably with Duterte. As chairman of the Senate blue ribbon committee, he acted as hatchet man in the implausible case of his fellow senator Leila de Lima, the hound Duterte had tried to shake off from his days as mayor of Davao City and hers as chair of the Commission on Human Rights.
Some notes on public opinion
Felipe Buencamino and I had an interesting discussion on surveys. Let’s assume when it comes to expressing opinions on the President, the fear factor kicks in and people lie. It explains a lot—but also, in other less president-specific questions people express their real opinions. We can therefore gauge public opinion obliquely. Problem is, all sides rely on the surveys to gauge viability of candidates. Wouldn’t mean fear factor would distort those responses so long as President is a possible candidate? Yes and no; I suspect so long as it’s not sure he will run, people will be more willing to express an opinion but it will be cautious.
But Felipe has an interesting response. It won’t be until maybe 1 or 2 surveys into the actual campaign period that public opinion will start being accurately recorded. The reason for this is it will take that long for other candidates to hammer away at issues that are critical of the President and the public will take a cue from the candidates and be emboldened to express their true opinions.
But if this is so, candidates who are cautiously eyeing the surveys to see if they are viable, are doing their potential candidacies a disservice as the President’s fear factor is distorting those surveys. The real test of viability can only happen in the middle of the campaign and not before; so the real litmus test is if a potential candidate is visionary enough to dare to run despite the odds.
The above is worth taking into account, when it comes to the June survey serving as a kind of benchmark to trace the ups and downs of potential candidates, in the getting-to-know-you pre-campaign period until October:
These snapshots in turn are also going to be studied with commissioned snapshots zeroing in on different scenarios:
And an overall warning from public opinion, that despite the unprecedented circumstances at present, the administration is suffering nowhere near the blowback one might otherwise expect.
The clincher
Is this slide. Low turnout is to be expected. Who stands to gain from such a situation?
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