The candidates: Estrada

Watching Joseph Estrada walk into our office last Friday night, we were reminded again of why he won in 1998 by the largest margin ever in our political history.

Erap is still, hands down, the most charming among all the presidential aspirants – the kind of charm that emanates from taking genuine pleasure in the company of people. With him the hoi polloi can be sure that he won’t cleanse away handshakes with alcohol or scented disinfectant as soon as he is safely hidden behind tinted car windows.

He is still disarmingly candid – about his decadent pleasures, his vices, his pet peeves – and he never runs out of fresh jokes, especially the naughty ones.

But this is no longer 1998, when Erap garnered 10.7 million votes – almost 40 percent – against his closest rival Jose de Venecia’s nearly 4.27 million (15.87 percent).

Today Erap can’t seem to get past third place in the surveys, behind Senators Noynoy Aquino and Manny Villar.

If Erap is disappointed with his survey ratings, he doesn’t show it. The warm reception he receives on the campaign trail probably reinforces his belief that he has not lost his formidable mass appeal. As Sen. Richard Gordon, who is also languishing in the surveys, recently quipped: if we keep putting too much weight on those ratings, let’s just have surveys instead of elections.

But it would be foolish to disregard the surveys altogether, so the Erap campaign team is working to burnish the vote-getting appeal of their candidate.

Or at least that’s what it looked to us, when Erap faced our editorial staff for over three hours Friday night for the third installment of The STAR’s series on presidential candidates.

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A notable change, from what Erap intimated to us several months before he filed his candidacy, was his stand on the prosecution of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo when her presidency ends.

This time he says he would just leave this to the judiciary, whose independence he wants to uphold.

The Erap camp wants to dispel perceptions that his comeback bid is all about vendetta.

So what’s his campaign all about? Erap groused that his original pro-poor slogan, and even his color – orange, to symbolize the post-EDSA I unity of the anti-Marcos yellow and pro-Marcos red – had been hijacked by the other Tondo-born presidential bet, Villar.

The Erap team has coined a new slogan: Kung May Erap, May Ginhawa. If there’s Erap, there’s prosperity, or relief from poverty.

Beyond the slogan, Erap’s team wants to emphasize to critics that he has his distinct campaign platform. If Noynoy believes eradicating corruption is the best cure for poverty while Villar thinks eradicating poverty is the cure for corruption, Erap says poverty will go down and investments will come in if there is peace and order.

This then takes us back to 1998, when Erap, who as Fidel Ramos’ vice president was also the designated chief crime-buster, campaigned for the presidency on a peace-and-order platform.

But back then Erap had Panfilo Lacson, the head of an elite police task force, to bolster that platform. Today Lacson is wanted for twin murders, and has insinuated that Erap knew about the crime.

Today an anti-crime platform could also sound incongruous when it comes from the camp of a man convicted of plunder. But Erap insists that he was persecuted, not prosecuted, by the same bunch that conspired to oust him. He maintains his innocence despite a presidential pardon that is supposed to be accompanied by an admission of guilt and expressions of contrition by the pardoned convict.

Victory in May will be his ultimate vindication, but the Erap camp no longer wants to stress this point.

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Instead they are addressing the perceived weaknesses of their candidate.

One is his health. With both kneecaps replaced, Erap seems to have trouble walking. But a recent executive checkup showed him in “perfect health,” Erap assured us. He devoured a small plate of his favorite chicharon Bisaya before our office nurse took his blood pressure: 130/80.

After he won in 1998, there was speculation that Erap would succumb to cirrhosis before the end of his term because of heavy drinking. But he didn’t get sick at all.

At 72 (turning 73 in April), Erap is the oldest of the presidential aspirants. His campaign manager Ernesto Maceda points to China as a good example of what senior leaders can do for a country.

Erap still smokes a pack a day, and took a nicotine break during his visit to our office. But he swears he is physically fit, and he considers “the ladies’ delight” to be the best part of his body. His sexual activity, he claims, is now down from “araw-araw, gabi-gabi” to just every night.

His smoking has nothing to do with governance, he says, and neither do his past indiscretions that have produced him children with four women. It was the only time during the interview that Erap lost his cool, although he later acknowledged, on the record, that he has four firstborns.

There are people who will disagree with his view on families and governance. During his presidency, his women and children were secured by the state, and there were scandals involving mansions and other expensive gifts allegedly given by influence-peddlers to some of his women and children.

For those who remember only the scandals of his aborted presidency, Erap likes to tell them that none of his Cabinet members became involved in corruption scandals, which is why he would give them back their former positions if he wins.

He also wants to reassure voters that there is more between his ears than just “Eraptions” and sex jokes.

Erap went to our office after a long day of campaigning in La Union. He slipped on some points, such as climate change, some of his plans were simplistic, and he seemed clueless about the Right of Reply bill, but overall he fielded the questions pretty well.

“He does have a platform, he knows what he’s planning to do,” Maceda told us. “After 31 years in public service, he’s street-smart, with a lot of common sense.”

Addressing another perceived deficiency, Erap spoke mostly in English, emphasizing that “I studied in Ateneo, that’s why magaling ako mag-Ingles.”

Probably borrowing a page from seasoned orator Dick Gordon, Erap now even quotes Mahatma Gandhi, when asked about his ouster from the presidency: The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

It won’t be easy selling this other aspect of Erap, but his team isn’t losing hope.

“We’re blessed by the fact that he’s very much underrated,” Maceda said.