4-way

After such Herculean effort on the part of opposition politicians who desperately needed a standard-bearer with total name-recall and a respectable voter preference rating, Fernando Poe Jr. has conceded to run for the presidency.

Well, to be very precise, FPJ is still hewing and hawing, like a hydrophobic standing on the edge of the diving board. Those egging him on are the ones declaring that he has indeed thrown his hat into the ring.

Sen. Panfilo Lacson, who has campaigned the longest and the hardest, says he will yield to another candidate if that is what the selection process of the anti-Gloria opposition yields. His cheering squad, however, is playing another tune – asking that the movie actor be the policeman’s vice-presidential candidate instead. By doing that, Poe may earn the experience he so badly needs in managing an extremely unwieldy government.

My bet is that Lacson will run anyway even if FPJ is drafted by the Angara faction.

There is no established selection process for the opposition. There are no established party mechanisms to begin with. The selection process will likely be chaotic, bitterly contested and inconclusive.

There will be squabbles over delegate selection. The more established politicians are in the Angara camp. The Angara camp obviously wants Poe to be the standard bearer. They did not woo and cajole the box-office king so hard only to let him lose in the selection process.

There are enough people in the Angara camp who do not trust Lacson, who dread the Zamora brothers who are handling the senator’s presidential bid and who are suspicious of those who are financing this effort.

Deposed president Joseph Estrada will, without doubt, throw whatever political weight he has left, behind the FPJ bid. That is a vital factor in the opposition’s "selection" process.

We anticipate a hurriedly convened kangaroo convention to crown FPJ. That should happen soon – before the reluctant candidate loses heart and changes mind.

Besides, Lacon’s voter preference rating remains frozen at the same level it was this time last year. At 10 percent to 11 percent, Lacson has enough to threaten a candidacy, but not enough to win considering the deep-seated resistance to the idea of him becoming president.

Lacson gambled badly when he chose to play the role of battering ram against the Macapagal-Arroyo presidency. His accusatory rampage might have damaged the political standing of the incumbent. But it did not produce the overwhelming popularity Lacson’s handlers might have expected.

Lacson’s handlers forgot that in politics, battering rams often end up as sacrificial lambs.

The accusatory rampage backfired on Lacson. It typecast him as a trouble-maker, a rabble-rouser, a character assassin and a reckless grandstander. By doing what he did, Lacson pushed himself off the mainstream and condemned his candidacy to the political fringes.

FPJ’s unsurprising entry into the electoral arena sets the stage for a 4-way race with Raul Roco, Lacson and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

The last survey I saw put Gloria Macapagal and Raul Roco in dead heat, significantly behind Noli de Castro. FPJ falls about six points behind Roco and Lacson about three points behind FPJ. Since de Castro does not seem psychologically, educationally and organizationally prepared to enter the presidential game, the lead is actually being contested by GMA and Roco.

These are very good numbers for the incumbent. All the Gloria camp needs to do is to prevent Roco from spurting ahead in the pre-campaign preference ratings. With the two running nose-to-nose in the ratings game, campaign contributors would likely bank on the incumbent, drying up Roco’s war chest early in the game.

Poe’s partisans prefer to look at their version of the arithmetic of this game. They say that if de Castro is not running, much of his votes will go the movie actor considering that both popular personalities are drawing their support from the same sections of the electorate: the poor, the rural, the undereducated and the uninformed.

That arithmetic cannot be completely discounted even if Poe’s partisans tend to overstate the transferability of voter preferences.

If Lacson withdraws from the race, that might produce better transferability of voter preference. With both him and Poe running, the constituency that swept Joseph Estrada to office will be divided up. The campaign financiers of the Estrada bloc will be distributed.

With only one of them running, all the elements of the 1998 Estrada campaign will be consolidated: the former Marcos cronies, the politicized poor, the expectant outsiders, the aging politicos and the dirty money men.

Well, all the elements save one: the major provincial political lords who have, one by one, swore allegiance to the more predictable candidacy of the incumbent. GMA’s camp has been quietly wooing every local political broker, every established provincial political clan and every known warlord.

GMA is craftily using every advantage of the incumbent to underpin her campaign. It is an effort very much consistent with her own personality: patient, diligent and detailed. Like her father did many years ago, GMA has seen to it that she visits every town in the archipelago.

With a limited war chest and few politicians in his fold, Roco has relied on directly accessing the voters through media. The last few days, he has doubled his effort at media visibility. By his own intellectual disposition and by the constraints of his limited organization, Roco will continue the experimental campaign he began in 1998.

Lacson is investing his political resources in media as well. He has flooded the broadcast outlets with his professionally crafted propaganda. But he remains trapped in his law and order message.

FPJ, meanwhile, is still teetering on the edge of the diving board. At some point, soon, somebody will have to get up there and push him into the water.

But the predicament here is that he might not swim.