Political guns quiet / Hall of Fame response

Finally, it’s June 2003, a month that unchains Prometheus and unleashes the first tongues of a political fire leading to the May presidential elections next year. So far, politics in the Philippines has been relatively quiet, at times even quiescent. The present clutch of visible presidential aspirants prefers to keep their powder dry, eying the political battlefield ahead like nervous fist-fighters still in their dressing rooms. Nobody has fired his or her big guns. Each watches the others warily and looks at the political environment with beady, sometimes suspicious, always watchful eyes.

It was never like this before.

More than a year before previous presidential elections, the candidates were already in their foxholes or starting blocks or riding tanks prepared to roll for political war. Early 1991, political observers were already plumb sure the presidential match-up would pit Fidel Valdez Ramos and Miriam Defensor Santiago in a torrid brawl in May 1992. FVR won by the skin of his teeth. Early 1997, or even before that, the signals came that the man to beat was Joseph Estrada and breathing on his back was Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The fight was that tight. Except that GMA, lured into the Lakas-NUCD camp of Jose de Venecia, stepped down to run for the vice presidency instead. And she won under the Lakas-NUCD flag with more votes than Erap Estrada himself. Raul Roco placed third behind Joe de V.

Today, the approaching presidential campaign walks on tiptoe.

And it walks on tiptoe because there are a number of unseen or murky factors. Will Eduardo (Danding) Cojuangco – now testing the political factors with Ginebra ads – eventually run and descend like a thunderclap on the presidential race? Will Fernando Poe Jr. (the redoubtable FPJ) eventually unsheathe a political sword to buttress his legend as King of Philippine movies? And if Danding runs, will Ping Lacson remove himself? And Noli de Castro. Where the heck does he get all that popularity? Simply by bellowing Magandang Gabi Bayan into the emotional innards of the masses for decades and doing nothing much else?

Then there is Mindanao. It’s like Godzilla on its hunkers, bullet wounds all over but far from expiring. On the contrary, Mindanao daily gets to be more intractable, more ungovernable. The signals from the White House and the Pentagon are that more US combat troops are forthcoming to engage the Muslim secessionists in battle. If that should happen, how will it impact on the presidential elections? And if it happens, what happens to Philippine political sovereignty and territorial integrity?

But the big question mark that overhangs everything else is: Will GMA drop her pledge to forgo 2004 and wade into the presidential campaign with a big, reverberating bang?

While GMA continues to deny she is going back on her December 30, 2002 "never again" pledge, the fact is our diminutive president has been sucked into the whirlpool of international politics. In this whirlpool, President George W. Bush is the brawny Maximus of global gladiatorial combat. And the two have seemingly fallen in love, politically that is. What an odd pair! You see pictures of Dubya (for that is the US president’s nickname) and GMA walking intimately together. George W.’s arm on her shoulder or on her back, a fondness that radiates a hundred political lessons for those who care to understand the body language of US politics. And the specific language of George W. Bush.

I know GMA, and I think I know her well.

Her cultural roots are American more than they are Filipino. In this, she is just like almost all educated Filipinos weaned on Yankee ethos and Western civilization. And the American way of life. She was and remains inordinately proud of the fact she and Bill Clinton were classmates at Georgetown University, remained friends after that, and wrote each other nostalgic letters. When Clinton as president was here in 1995 for the APEC summit, he gushed over GMA’s youthful looks and pulchritude and singled her out over FVR for personal attention. Don’t’ get me wrong. Filipinos in the main are flushed with self-importance when any of their leaders get pride of place in White House attention.

But the months of June and July are still very much in my mind.

They are a demarcation line in the ground, a sort of starting point for the preliminary run to Malacañang. So we expect the serious presidentiables to come out in the open. The presidential poll surveys for these two months should also open our eyes to the relative strength or strengths of the candidates. Raul Roco will find out more or less where he stands a year from the elections since he no longer dominates the presidential surveys with brio like Abou Ben Adhem. He didn’t peak too early as many claim. Mr. Roco simply didn’t’ add red meat and fancy bone to his early lead. He kept quiet on a number of exploding national issues, and this hurt him. He wasn’t visible at all and voluble at all like Ping Lacson and Noli de Castro.

The June-July surveys should also reflect the first impact on the Filipino electorate of GMA’s White House state visit, an event Dubya cups in his hands with child-like wonder like the glowing Pearl of Antilles.

The first sounds are encouraging. Some ranking members of the business community are now gung-ho for La Gloria in 2004. US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone just had in tow two visiting US senators calling the Japanese ambassador Kojiro Takano virtually a liar by saying the Philippines business climate was just fine. They added that some American investors were now willing to take the plunge. This Takano really put his foot in his mouth and shot himself in the leg when he bad-mouthed the Philippines before foreign correspondents stationed here.

Pretty soon, George W. will dispatch groups of US businessmen to come over to sprinkle more stardust in our eyes. The US leadership possesses many ways and means to communicate sublimally and not so sublimally that GMA is their candidate for 2004. We Filipinos are suckers for that sort of thing. But let’s admit one thing. Where before we hauled GMA over the coals for prematurely and cheaply embracing the US line on terrorism, now she deserves some praise for delivering not just peanuts but a hefty grab-bag of economic and military goodies.

America needs the Philippines strategically and Washington can be expected to deliver these goodies.

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The following is part of the prepared response I was scheduled to deliver last Thursday evening before the Manila Rotary Club, which designated five journalists as the first inductees to its Hall of Fame. The four others were Max Soliven, publisher and chairman of the Board of Directors of The Philippine STAR, columnists Amando Doronila, Belinda Olivares Cunanan of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and Jessica Soho GMA-7. And, of course, myself as STAR columnist.

* * *

"When I started out as a cub reporter journalist more than half a century ago for the postwar Manila Tribune, I was absolutely in awe of the great names at the time. Who wouldn’t be? They remain great. There was the inimitable Carlos P. Romulo, the only Filipino to win America’s highly coveted Pulitzer prize for his reporting on China during that country’s civil war. CPR was still to win more honors after that. He won the appellation, Mr. United Nations, for being one of its legendary pioneers. CPR "walked among the great", a man who had silver in his tongue, international adventure in his heart, and a talisman for fame writ all over his short stature. Our journalism today just doesn’t have them anymore. We had Salvador P. Lopez, first Commonwealth literary prize winner editor, essayist par excellence who wrote great and immortal English as thought he owned the language.

"We had newspaper editors like Vicente Albano Pacis and Jose A. Lansang, Fatso Intengan, publishers like Modesto Farolan and the long line of the Roceses. We had political columnists like Armando Malay, Arsenio Lacson, M. Dayrit, names that can come down the pike today and still shake our world of journalism like an aspen. I am rather proud I broke my wisdom teeth as a newsmen in those surroundings. For I learned a lot. Everyday I rubbed the stardust from my eyes. I didn’t intend to stay long, however. My father before he died pronounced on his deathbed I was to be a lawyer. This would fulfill his dreams since on the eve of the board exams of his day, he had a heart attack and never again would he open a law book.

"But I stayed. More correctly perhaps, I overstayed.

"And I have no regrets. I have lived a full, rich, exciting, ennobling, colorful life as a journalist. And when the letter of Rod Reyes came stating I would be one of the first five inductees to the Hall of Fame, I can tell you I felt so elated I figuratively hit the roof in delight and delectation.

"The world has no many nobilities. I am exceedingly proud to belong to the nobility of the pen. And I can say as I prepare to bow out – tenderly, I hope–into the night: I fought the good fight."