he biggest threat to VP Leni-Robredo’s campaign, right now, is Bongbong Marcos. In terms of actual voting support, I believe that Leni Robredo has more than enough votes to secure the presidency with a comfortably wide margin. But the fact that many pre-election surveys—including by two polling entities I normally trust—continue to show Marcos leading in double digit margins leaves me a little befuddled.
This performance seemed to be unaffected by his refusal to participate in all presidential debates. His problem is not lack of communicating ability, Ferdinand, Jr. is articulate enough. I think mainly the reason his campaign handlers have steered him away from these debates is because they anticipate a lot of questions might be asked about martial law. It’s topic avoidance, plain and simple.
Martial law is one of those subjects best revisited through the warming filter of sentimentalism. I have a theory that it’s all psychological--that the Marcos campaign had somehow figured out how to exploit.
To illustrate my point, consider that not all 1970s music was good but even if you heard the trashiest song of that decade today, it would still evoke some sort of sepia mood in you.
1970s music was the soundtrack of many peoples’ lives. Those lives are rich in fuzzy happy memories of a carefree, even psychedelic era, if you will. Of course, none of that has anything to do with martial law, or Marcos, but they dull any ugliness of the repressive regime of the day.
However, modern scholars have the advantage of a broader overview of history. This gives them a second chance to revisit history and to fact-check any effort at revisionism.
THAT is what Ferdinand, Jr.’s handlers do not want him to get emroiled in--a counter-productive program in martial law apologetics.
The father is dead—he’s a tyrrant of epic notoriety but death has sealed his lips from any need to explain himself. So why risk raising Marcos from the dead by having Ferdinand, Jr. stand in as a substitute dart board for every historian’s target practice?
No, if you’re going to have Ferdinand, Jr. run on the record of his father’s achievements, you have to project that record unblemished by post-modern criticism—and then refuse to take any questions. Meanwhile, Ferdinand, Jr.’s job in this campaign is just to REMIND people of the romantic Ilocano legend by just looking and sounding LIKE the father—that’s all.
So every occasion that Ferdinand, Jr. runs away from a debate challenge, his handlers want the voter to perceive it as an effort to protect and preserve a legacy. Don’t look now but if you argue the point, then you just conceded that such legacy even existed. See the trick there?
However, even all that cannot explain entirely the lopsided survey ratings—and I concede nothing concerning these surveys’ accuracy or “scientific-ness.” That will be a topic for a separate article later.
My suspicion is that these surveys are a subliminal feed, a carefully-designed tool working on the subconscious and influencing voters by the power of suggestion, bordering on mass hypnotism. Since they are aimed at achieving a specific result—a Marcos bandwagon atmosphere—that’s a dead giveaway that the numbers are doctored.
I can think of two objectives for doing that: one is to help Ferdinand, Jr. win the election or, in the event he loses, to lay the basis for claiming electoral fraud later by raising the question, how can anyone who led the race most of the way falter in the homestretch and eventually lose?
Ferdinand, Jr. can do to a Robredo presidency what Donald Trump is doing to the Biden administration, namely hanging a lingering cloud of doubt on its legitimacy. That ensures that the Marcos brand would stick around for a generation or two more, perhaps to capitalize on another redux of misty-eyed nostalgia and even fainter recollections of martial law atrocities. Whatever the reasons are, the forces behind this kind of manipulation have an uncannily long-term perspective.
Natural persons don’t have that kind of long view, or a propensity for reckoning events that would happen well beyond their lifetimes. This leaves only one possible causal agent: external institutional agenda—perhaps industrial, sectoral or even foreign state interests.
I’m not a particular fan of farfetched conspiracy theories. But I think it’s not a long stretch to cast a suspicious eye on the US.
I know—you’re thinking that’s ridiculous, how can the Americans throw their support behind the son of a dictator who is facing corruption and ill-gotten wealth recovery cases in several US courts, right?
Well, how can the Ameriçans have supported that dictator HIMSELF for several decades, in the first place?
You are naïve to assume that good old Uncle Sam is the paragon of virtue and universal political morality. Historically, US foreign policy is capsulized in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1939 take on Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, “He’s a sonofabitch, but he’s OUR sonofabitch!”—a quote that was famously copied by US Vice President (to Ronald Reagan) George H. W. Bush in describing Ferdinand Marcos in 1984.
In world politics, as it is in domestic, there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. Those interest could be existing or inchoate—they once existed and are now sorely missed.
The outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the looming dominance of China, the worsening belligerence of North Korea, the slow collapse of democratic governments in HongKong and Taiwan—all these are just a few of a growing number of reasons opening America’s eyes to one thing it has missed for almost 25 years now: its former military bases in the Philippines.
Clark and Subic once served as its forward jumping points in responding to flashpoints of international conflicts beyond the Atlantic horizon. But the US lost those bases after Ferdinand Marcos was toppled in 1986.
You’d think the US stood an excellent chance of keeping those bases under a president they unabashedly supported, Corazon Aquino. But she stood by and watched the bases close down in 1991, with only a year remaining in her term. She was not too helpful in the effort to extend the RP-US Military Bases Agreement, which narrowly lost a vote in the Senate controlled by nationalist Aquino allies.
The next president Fidel V. Ramos, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, was decidedly pro-American. But there was little he could do in the fewer than five months from the beginning of his term in June to the departure of the last US military serviceman from those lost US bases in November 1992.
His successor, the populist Joseph Estrada, was famously one of the senators who had voted against the extension of the bases agreement, and as many as those that believed the US had a role in his ouster in 2001, many also conclude that his hand-picked US puppet successor Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo could not “deliver” either.
Worse, another populist successor Rodrigo Duterte paradoxically proved to be the most anti-West and most pro-China postwar Asian leader to ever emerge.
If you were the Americans, you would think, look, rightwing presidents like Ramos, Arroyo and left-leaning populists like Estrada and Duterte cannot be relied on.
Centrists—or who claim to be “independent” just have a little bit too much of a nationalist streak in them, like the Aquinos and possibly Robredo—these people won’t play ball.
What you want is a president who is not too intelligent, asks few questions and just counts the money—like an intellectually-challenged Marcos.
You have him on a leash already, with outstanding warrants against him in US courts. Alright, you cannot actually serve those warrants on a head of state. But the fact that you have the goods on him and he is an oligarch with assets he’d like to protect on US soil, or stashed away in US banks, he’s the exact surrogate the doctor ordered that if asked to jump would ask back “how high?”
Besides that absurd theory, I have no other explanations for those dubious lopsided surveys.**
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