I have a friend who has always maintained that he will vote for anyone who promises to throw President Noynoy Aquino in jail. This late, he still doesn’t have a candidate.
Earlier this week, I blamed Aquino’s diffident and incompetent style of governance for the rise of Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte as a viable presidential candidate. But the bad example of Aquino is only partly responsible for Duterte’s burgeoning popularity—the potty-mouthed mayor’s rivals also aided and abetted his rise by failing to seize the opportunity of becoming the “anti-Aquino” that the people are apparently desperately seeking.
Aquino’s successful 2010 campaign will help explain this. After he decided to run, upon seeing the multitudes who turned up for the wake of his mother Cory, Noynoy and his handlers understood that his message would be simple: whatever the incumbent, Gloria Arroyo, was perceived to be, he would become the exact opposite of that.
So Noynoy went about staking his claim to being the anti-Arroyo, in the process scaring the candidate who thought he had dibs to that title—a certain Mar Roxas II, who had even tried his hand at being an early version of Duterte by cursing Gloria on public stages. So successful was Aquino’s demonization of Arroyo that all the other candidates, like Manny Villar, had faded by the new year.
Of course, it’s ironic that Aquino, nearing the end of his term now, would suffer from the same malaise that made Arroyo such an easy target for him in 2010. What’s strange is that none of Aquino’s would-be successors consciously decided to portray themselves as the polar opposite of the now-hated incumbent.
Even Duterte, as I’ve already written, has never openly described himself as standing squarely against the incumbent. But simply by being perceived as a cuss-happy man of action, one who will solve the ills that Aquino made so little headway against in his six years, the Davao City mayor has zoomed to the top of the rankings.
Duterte’s supporters will go a bit further that the candidate himself, routinely praising the mayor for not being under the influence of the incumbent. The persistence of reports that Vice President Jejomar Binay and Senator Grace Poe are really candidates of Aquino just like Roxas is can partly explain Duterte’s easy separation from the rest of the pack; the fact that all three of these candidates, for varying lengths of time, actually worked with Aquino in his administration surely didn’t help them differentiate themselves from the president.
Roxas, of course, cannot wean himself from Aquino, having been designated as the one true inheritor of “daang matuwid”; we now know how far his message of continuity has gotten him. But Binay and Poe never really presented themselves as real alternatives to Aquino, either, though they have been sniping at him of late.
The voters, apparently, need someone to tell them that Aquino has been an abject failure and that radical change is about to happen. This, in my view, is why they will embrace even the nebulous “tunay na pagbabago” (real change) that Duterte is offering, since no one else wants to truly turn his back on the failed incumbent.
Duterte has always portrayed himself as a strong leader in contrast to the weakling in Malacañang. He promises to do actual things, where the incumbent is dismissed as a do-nothing absentee landlord/slacker for life.
How could all the bright political minds working for the candidates and the supposedly brilliant candidates themselves miss that?
* * *
The gross misreading of the popular anti-Aquino sentiment by the major candidates and their advisers is even more evident in the vice presidential race. In the case of Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., he didn’t even have to lift a finger to criticize Aquino —and like Duterte, the senator from Ilocos Norte is now threatening to run away from the rest of the field.
Simply because of who is he and what he represents to Noynoy and his family, the Aquino administration decided to go tooth and nail against Bongbong. The results of this, again, are plain to see.
Unlike Aquino, who had to campaign hard to paint Arroyo as the devil incarnate, Marcos just did the usual political work—forging alliances, going on provincial sorties and making non-controversial statements—and look where it’s gotten him. That Aquino is making Marcos win by trying so hard to make him lose is such a tired old joke that it’s become axiomatic.
And yet, most people can’t seem to make the next step—that it is Aquino himself who cannot make his candidates win and who cannot seem to defeat those he throws the full weight of his presidency against. Why?
All of this, of course, sounds like Monday morning quarterbacking, a little over two weeks before the May 9 elections. But perhaps it’s not too late yet for the lesson to sink in: probably the best way to win is to become the anti-Aquino—something no one, not even Duterte, has tried to do.
