Fiasco

By the time you read this, the two major senatorial tickets should have been announced by their respective coalitions. The deadline for filing of candidacies for the senatorial contest was over yesterday.

Over the past few days, the so-called "united opposition" has succeeded in making itself a gross misnomer. The alliance collapsed like a deck of cards. The ticket it is fielding had to be reinforced from their second tier of candidates to fill the slack caused by high-profile defections.

By contrast, the administration ticket has its pick of the field. With a surfeit of candidates, the ruling coalition parties had the luxury not only of picking the most winnable ones but also of building a balanced team that optimizes voter attractiveness across regions.

The fiasco that is the "united opposition" is of their own making.

Only a few weeks ago, spokesmen of this political faction were crowing that the next election was theirs to lose. They announced that the coming contest will be a "referendum" on Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. They produced mirages of a "12-0" victory and imagined the 2007 contest as the start of a march to power in 2010.

It was the hubris of this political faction that finally did them in.

A small group around Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay designated themselves high priests of sorts and reduced the candidate-selection process into some sort of conclave, governed entirely by their own prejudices and jealousies. They met behind closed doors and threw all transparency to the wind.

Having convinced themselves that victory was in the bag simply by calling one’s self the opposition, the Binay faction began treating allies with arrogance. There is, as later events demonstrated, a price to pay for hubris.

This was not a party selection process. It was a coup.

The first victims of the coup, Tito Sotto and Tessie Aquino Oreta, were among those politicians most loyal to deposed former president Joseph Estrada. Jinggoy Estrada was never seriously engaged in the process. Kit Tatad broke from the group and aired his grievances most publicly.

The winners of that internal coup were either directly or indirectly (by virtue of kinship) involved in the successful effort to impeach Estrada in 2000. Consider these names: Guingona, Pimentel, Cayetano, Villar, Pangilinan, Aquino, Legarda and Escudero.

While the Binay faction was negotiating with the so-called "Wednesday Group", that list might have included Joker Arroyo and possibly some leading lights of what Estrada derisively referred to as "Evil Society."

This was a cast of characters not pleasing at all to the deposed president.

Which is all very strange, considering that the opportunists who wanted to sneak back to power by taking control of the "opposition" senatorial ticket also hinged their whole strategy on Estrada supplying the war chest for this campaign. That was a serious lapse in political analysis.

According to the grapevine, Estrada contributed very little financial support to the FPJ campaign in 2004 — even as the opposition’s standard-bearer was his closest friend. There is very little reason for the deposed president to invest in any substantial way in this senatorial campaign, there being very little actual power at stake. But the faction that took control of the candidate-selection process kept trying to pry some funds out of the detained former president.

I have it on good source that Estrada asked his son, JV, to withdraw from the senatorial ticket being assembled by the Binay faction in a moment of pique. By withdrawing his son from the ticket of the "united opposition", the opportunist politicians who had taken control of that camp (and who had even refused the courtesy of reviving Estrada’s PMP) would have no leverage in forcing the Estrada family to spend for this campaign.

JV’s withdrawal was later cynically spun as a principled statement against "political dynasties." That spin cannot forever hide the truth behind the incident.

That event basically signals the withdrawal of the Estrada camp from the "united opposition." The really bad news for the political washouts who had looked greedily at the prospect of taking control of this campaign’s finances is that there is not likely to be any financial flows from the direction of the deposed president.

Although his own personal coffers are presumably ample, it is not likely that Binay will underwrite this campaign. Over the next few weeks, he will himself be fighting for reelection against a popular challenger and will be spending as well to get his children elected so that they may become proper heirs to his little kingdom.

His passion for running (and to do so, fund) the affairs of the "united opposition" will dramatically diminish very soon.

The only other person in this unlikely cast of characters with some capacity to raise campaign financing is Panfilo Lacson. But he is basically a political Lone Ranger and has very little interest in financing his ostensible partners in the ticket — especially since campaign funds are really hard to come by these days.

The Binay faction produced a fiasco.

Now without a rudder, the senatorial ticket of the "united opposition" will be forced to campaign individually. They might as well have run as independents. If they did, they would not have to carry the baggage of a sloppy candidate-selection process and all the hubris of those whose delusions outstripped actual capacity to deliver.

Having talked so arrogantly of this contest being a crushing "referendum" on President Arroyo, the opposition ticket cannot now try to make a play for the underdog vote.

They pegged themselves to a wrong theme. And there is no conceivable strategy that could be executed on that theme.

Instead of being a referendum, this contest is a political watershed marking the retreat of the Estrada factor from our politics, revealing the disarray among the pygmies who thought they could still make political hay in the large shadow the former president cast.