3-M signatures to urge Noli to run

A group of small businessmen and marginalized sector workers is now gathering three million signatures urging the reluctant candidate Sen. Noli de Castro to make a run for the presidency next year.

The group foresees a showdown between "Kabayan," as De Castro is popularly known, and movie actor Fernando Poe Jr., or FPJ, for the highest post in the land in the May 10, 2004 elections.

"We believe that all the idealistic politicians now surrounding Fernando Poe Jr. will side with Senator De Castro once he decides to run for president," Isko Katibayan, spokesman for the Kabayan for President Movement, told The STAR in an interview.

Katibayan said their group chose to support De Castro as they saw "in him the realization of the Filipino dream."

Meanwhile, opposition Sen. Gregorio Honasan said yesterday that De Castro, if he decides to run for president, will be a Malacañang proxy candidate.

Honasan told a news conference that President Arroyo’s political strategists and allies are now having sleepless nights with the nomination of Poe, a popular movie actor, as the opposition standard bearer.

Katibayan said his 20,000-member group comprised mainly of small businessmen, jeepney drivers and other marginalized workers aims to gather one million signatures each from Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao before Christmas Day.

According to Katibayan, De Castro has an edge over Poe considering his almost 20 years of service in the media industry.

"When you are in media, it would count as public service," Katibayan said.

In addition to the signature campaign, the Kabayan for President Movement has also prepared a 12-point agenda which it hopes will be considered by De Castro as his platform of government.

The 12-point agenda will be unveiled by the group today at a press conference in Marikina City to be attended by 100 public transport sector leaders from different areas in Metro Manila.

One of the major points in the agenda, Katibayan said, seeks to address the problems facing the public transport sector such as the price increases in petroleum and oil products and stiff fines for traffic violations.

About 500 Kabayan for President Movement members will flock to the Senate next week to hand over their agenda to De Castro. At the Senate, the group members will hold vigil to urge De Castro to accept their call, Katibayan said.

He said that De Castro, aside from being a well-known mass media practitioner, is well qualified to run for president having finished a degree in banking and finance at the University of the East.

As a neophyte senator, De Castro also crafted bills to benefit the welfare of overseas Filipino workers and the elderly, Katibayan added.

While it is true that there are other candidates who are also patriotic and are identified with the masses, it is only De Castro who rose from the ranks, is not surrounded by traditional politicians and has no vested interests, Katibayan said.

Palace Wild Card?

Because of Poe’s wide support from the cross section of the population, Honasan said the Arroyo administration "has been egging Noli (de Castro) to run for president so he can take away votes from FPJ."

"But I think they will get the surprise of their lives, especially when people see that a De Castro candidacy, if it materializes, was hatched at Malacañang," added Honasan, who hopes to be FPJ’s running mate.

De Castro has not made a decision on whether to run for president or vice president, or to run at all in next year’s elections, despite incessant prodding from Mrs. Arroyo’s allies and emissaries that he agrees to be her running mate.

In an interview with Newsbreak magazine, De Castro said, "I am not running. I don’t want to, I really don’t. It’s not a joke being president or vice president."

There are reports that De Castro’s bosses at the ABS-CBN, where the broadcaster-turned-senator still has his "Magandang Gabi Bayan" program, are brokering a deal with the President that would make their talent her running mate.

The senator has expressed irritation over the reports, saying he was not part of such a deal, if there was any.

A member of the Group of 5 in the Senate, to which the neophyte broadcaster-turned-senator belongs, has told reporters that "Kabayan" would announce in two weeks that he would seek the presidency and not the vice presidency.

Honasan said if the latest unofficial survey results are true, "what these numbers mean is that FPJ will win the elections by a landslide."

"He is better than Erap (ousted President Estrada), who won in 1998 by the biggest plurality margin since the Marcos era," he said.

Former Senate president Ernesto Maceda also spoke about the survey results in radio interviews yesterday. Maceda said they are from Pulse Asia, although the poll-taking group has not acknowledged whether it has conducted a new poll.

Only two weeks ago, Pulse Asia and the Social Weather Stations (SWS) released the results of their quarterly surveys of presidential and vice presidential wannabes.

In an interview after making the poll results public, Pulse Asia’s Felipe Miranda said although an Arroyo-De Castro teamup would be a good combination, it would be to the President’s interest if the broadcaster were encouraged to run for president instead.

The more there are presidential candidates, the better for Mrs. Arroyo, he said.

He cited the case of former President Fidel Ramos, who won the elections in 1992 in an eight-way race with 23 percent of the vote.

Meanwhile, Sen. Vicente Sotto III, who is acting as Poe’s unofficial spokesman, said yesterday the movie actor was still preparing his acceptance of the opposition’s nomination for him to be their standard-bearer.

"It’s not coming out today," he said. On Wednesday, when the "united" opposition made the nomination, Sotto said Poe would announce his acceptance yesterday.

Link Up For Kabayan

Katibayan said his group is willing to link up with other groups pushing for the candidacy of De Castro.

"We are willing to link up with them for as long as they have no questionable backgrounds and are not linked to anything illegal," Katibayan said.

Earlier, former finance secretary Edgardo Espiritu said many businessmen are now asking De Castro to run for president.

In a survey released by the pollster SWS last Dec. 3, Poe edged out by a very slim margin De Castro as the most likely candidate to win the polls.

In the Newsbreak article, De Castro says he has been receiving offers from all camps.

"There are people whom I sometimes don’t want to talk to because they are people I respect and might say yes to them," the magazine quoted him as saying.

The so-called Wednesday Group of neophyte senators has promised to support a De Castro bid for the presidency, Newsbreak said.

Other members of this group are Senators Ralph Recto and Francis Pangilinan, who are both of whose wives are popular actresses, Joker Arroyo and Manuel Villar.