Chatter

Campaign fatigue must be setting in. Some of the candidates are losing it. They are losing whatever it is that may make this campaign edifying: clarity of vision, sense of proportion, sobriety, respect for the good sense of the electorate.

Like a meteor that has burst into flames from friction with the atmosphere, some of the presidential campaigns have burst into, well, a cloud of mere chatter.

It seems the degradation of the quality of utterance of the presidential candidates is proportional to the magnitude of decline they are enduring in the voter preference surveys. The most significant – both in terms of decline in voter preference and in steepness of descent into mere chatter – is candidate Raul Roco.

The other day, Roco proposed a debate among the spouses of the candidates.

Why that should occur does not seem to make sense. We are not voting for the spouses. In the event of election, the candidate’s spouse occupies no official role in government. They cut ribbons and run charities. They do not make policy.

We desperately hope they do not make policy, unelected and therefore unaccountable as they are.

Roco’s suggestion provoked an uncharacteristically sharp and witty response from the FPJ camp, whose principal is famously allergic to debates. Roco is welcome to go forth and debate with his wife, said Boots Cadsawan of the FPJPM.

In a word, spare the spouses. They endure enough by the mere fact that they are married to candidates.

Before that, Roco claimed talks were underway for a "unity government" between his camp and those of Panfilo Lacson and Eddie Villanueva.

How there be "talks" about a "unity government" among candidates if it does not imply anyone withdrawing from the race to favor a rival? It is imaginable to think in terms of a merging of candidacies and campaigns. But "unity government" makes no sense.

Roco’s claim implied that Lacson and Villanueva were considering withdrawal from the race to favor the current third placer in the surveys. But even if we think in plain arithmetical terms, the sum of the shares of the vote of Roco, Lacson and Villanueva falls short of the share of each of the two frontrunners.

The camps of Lacson and Villanueva quickly denied such talks were happening. Roco was picking from thin air.

It is understandable that Lacson and Villanueva would vehemently deny Roco’s claim. That claim relegates the two others to subsidiary candidacies in the public mind. The intention here is fairly obvious: Roco is trying to mop up the votes of the two lesser candidates to benefit his own bid.

There is little chance Roco could force migration of voters from the FPJ base. He appeals to a higher income, better educated constituency. And there is very little chance he could get back his former supporters who migrated to the PGMA campaign. They are doing so to stop yet another movie actor from becoming president.

The only avenue open to improve his position in the last laps of the campaign is to draw Lacson’s and Villanueva’s votes.

That issue about a "unity government" was not the first time Roco’s foot was forced into his mouth.

Early in the campaign, Roco claimed that Senator Rodolfo Biazon moved to the K4 ticket in exchange for a P30 million campaign subsidy – a biblical number, recalling the 30 pieces of silver Judas received. An angry Biazon not only denied the claim but threatened to sue Roco for libel. Roco never brought up the matter again.

There is another issue Roco will have to deal with. In his TV ads, he claims responsibility for increasing the number of textbooks delivered to the public schools. Officials of the DepEd are now saying that the program was initiated during the tenure of the Estrada-era Education Secretary with assistance from the World Bank.

The issue here is not just truth in advertising. The issue here is character and integrity: at least the ability to avoid the temptation of taking credit at other people’s expense.

To be fair, Raul Roco is not solely responsible for what appears to be a serious deterioration in the quality of issues being tackled in this presidential campaign.

Through the first month of the campaign, Panfilo Lacson has played to the hilt the role of angry man on the margins. But that required maintaining a certain shrillness and a high degree of bitterness in his campaign.

To benefit his candidacy, Lacson has magnified the importance of corruption as an election issue and overemphasized the role of iron-fisted leadership to solve it. That invites a certain degree of caricaturing, laced by a predisposition to the salacious.

To keep the fires of the Jose Pidal issue alive, Lacson claimed last week that the First Gentleman and Vicky Toh met in Hong Kong. Why that matter should be important to the campaign he does not say. At any rate, there is – as usual – no evidence to lend credence to that stray claim.

More seriously, however, Lacson said the other day that the peso could fall to an exchange rate of P120:$1.

There is no basis at all for that claim. None of the monetary experts dare extrapolate currency exchange rates at long horizons. Nobody has accused Lacson of being a monetary expert and yet he now steps into that role with the darkest of forecasts.

But such irresponsible statements do contribute to increasing speculative pressure on our currency in the near term. The mere fact that such a statement is made by a major presidential candidate – even if it was obviously made for short-term political effect to narrowly benefit a candidacy – weakens our currency, undermines our economic prospects and injures our people.

The descent in the quality of electoral issues is infectious.

A KNP candidate created unwarranted alarm by claiming – with no shred of evidence – 2 million ballots are missing. Some lawyers have emerged from nowhere to sue the PCSO and Philhealth for doing what needs to be done: extending medical insurance to indigents. Plunderwatch, a band of leftist kibitzers to the Sandiganbayan trial, sued President Gloria for lenient treatment of former president Estrada . Eddie Villanueva now claims Eddie Gil, his rival for the bottom, was fielded by the Palace.

Something must be done urgently to restore this electoral campaign to a course where it will be edifying to our electorate.