EDITORIAL - For Mar, real work comes after endorsement

You have to allow Mar Roxas his dose of exhilarating high on finally getting endorsed by President Aquino. He truly deserves his moment of relief. After what must have felt like an eternity of nail-biting anxiety, he finally got what should expectedly be the shot in the arm he desperately needed to fire up his once-aborted yet still very much moribund presidential run.

Roxas should savor the moment while he can. Because pretty soon, he and his Liberal Party will have to settle down to the brass tacks and the inescapable reality that they still to campaign and campaign hard. A presidential endorsement by the incumbent is only a momentary relief in the often tenuous run for the highest office in the land.

The endorsement of Aquino can only make Roxas feel good for so long. Eventually, the work ahead will truly be about winning the votes. And if the sense on the ground is truly reflected in all those surveys, then the work ahead is even tougher now that the legacy of an administration rests squarely on his shoulders. The run of Roxas is in effect the true referendum on the Aquino administration.

With all the resources of the administration behind him, Roxas has a distinct advantage in organization, machinery and funding. What Roxas and his Liberal Party will now have to pay close attention to is the Grace Poe factor, and whether the senator comes on board or not. If Poe can be persuaded to run as runningmate of Roxas, that will surely deal a severe blow to the presidential bid of Vice President Jejomar Binay.

Binay, hounded by corruption allegations, has seen his numbers drop enough for him to be dislodged from first place in the surveys. But they have not dropped enough to allow Roxas to overtake him. Even more significantly, they have not dropped below a certain level, which suggests this is as far as Binay can drop, that the numbers that prop him up are his in real terms, meaning they constitute his bailiwick.

If Poe comes on board as VP to Roxas, then Binay can no longer gloat at Roxas the way he continues to do so. By no means does it mean that Roxas will have it in the bag if Poe comes on board, only that he will now have a real fighting chance against Binay. On the other hand, the greatest fear of Roxas and the Liberal Party is if Poe decides to go by herself and run for president, whether as an independent or with any other party.

If Poe makes it a three-way fight for the presidency, it will be the candidacy of Roxas that will suffer. Very easily the fight will shift to being between Poe and Binay. In such a scenario, not even Aquino can guarantee that some Liberal Party stalwarts will not jump to either Poe or Binay, because the winners will likely be one of either those two names. For Roxas, the work is not just to make his campaign work but to keep Poe either out of the way or have her come on board.