Trending Down

Posted on | February 4, 2010 | No Comments

What we’re seeing in the opinion surveys, with a little over three months left before the elections, now appears to have the unmistakable signs of a trend. And unless Noynoy Aquino wakes up in time and does something about it, the trend may become irreversible.

Aquino’s Liberal Party has attempted to put a positive spin on the results of the latest Social Weather Stations/Businessworld survey, which shows the once-humongous lead of its standard-bearer over his closest pursuer, Senator Manny Villar, whittled down to a mere seven percentage points. According to an LP news release, the seven-percent difference between the top two candidates “would [still] amount to about 3 million votes if all 49 million Filipinos vote on May 10.”

Unfortunately for Aquino, there is no guarantee that this supposedly big margin that he still retains, in actual votes, will stay his by election day. Even going by the last three surveys conducted by SWS alone, Aquino has fallen from 46 percent (Dec. 5-10), to 44 percent (Dec. 27-28) to the current 42 percent (Jan. 21-24).

As late as the beginning of the fourth quarter of last year, right after the death of his politically sainted mother Cory, Aquino’s SWS survey percentages were in the sixties, something that convinced his party’s brain trust to force Mar Roxas to accept the vice presidential slot and to all but proclaim Noynoy president-in-waiting. If Aquino were a stock in the market, people holding on to him had better sell now and cut their losses, or hope (against all evidence to the contrary) that he recovers some of his old value before unloading him in a hurry.

Of course, SWS was using its strange “pick three” method when it tracked the probability of Aquino walking all over his rivals in May, asking respondents to choose that many candidates that they would likely vote for instead of just one as traditional pollsters do. That may not only have served the purpose of enhancing the image of Aquino as frontrunner-by-a-mile in the eyes of the public but, ironically, also made Noynoy and the people who convinced him to run buy into his supposed invincibility, as well.

Indeed, at the rate Noynoy is losing ground to Villar, he may be overtaken in the opinion polls by the middle of March. The same polling outfit, after all, has tracked Villar’s consistent rise from 27 percent to 33 percent to 35 percent in the same three surveys where Aquino’s steady fall has been noted.

(Those who would argue that Aquino’s descent could have been the result of rigged polling by SWS should recall that their candidate has repeatedly clarified that the outfit is not among those he snarkily accused of buying survey results in Quiapo during one debate. As Aquino said in a letter to SWS president Mahar Mangahas, “We remain firm in our belief that the Social Weather Stations and all its officers remain true to their mission to deliver true and competent service to the Filipino public.”)

The changes in the SWS survey also appear to significantly involve only the top two contenders for the presidency. Thus, even if the latest survey was conducted after Joseph Estrada was cleared to run by both the Commission on Elections and the Supreme Court, there has been no change in his percentages—Estrada remains a poor third, even declining from 16 percent in early December to 13 percent, currently.

There is no sign of the predicted uptick in Estrada’s fortunes once voters become aware of the fact that there is no longer any legal basis to prevent him from seeking the presidency again. Similarly, the expected drop in Villar’s ratings as a result of the reheated brouhaha in the Senate over his alleged involvement in the C-5 “double insertion” scam has not yet been recorded—even if the survey was taken in part on the day national television carried the sensational events in that so-called august chamber live.

Of course, external factors like Villar’s continued airing of his commercials may have helped him gain on Aquino. But—and this is more scary for the Yellow horde— perhaps we are also seeing a drop-off in the popularity of the Liberal candidate because his usual and unending references to his mother and father (and his own new commercials promising not to steal) aren’t exactly keeping voters from shifting their loyalties to his rivals.

I find the latter reason more credible. And if Noynoy is losing ground because he is no longer connecting with the people, he should make it Job Number One to make sure that he does so, once again.

* * *

Despite the initial (and now, obviously flagging) outpouring of support for Noynoy Aquino, I am convinced that he should be worried less about Villar narrowing the gap between the two of them and be concerned with his apparent failure to close the distance between what he says and what the people believe more. In other words, because Aquino has not really gone beyond platitudes and motherhood statements, interspersed regularly with allusions to his politically sainted pedigree, people are starting to notice that he may not be the man for the job.

Indeed, many months into the unofficial campaign and nearing the start of the official one, Aquino has failed to go beyond what he stands for and promises to do and move forward to giving us concrete reasons to believe that he would make a good president. But that may be well-nigh impossible, given the fact that Noynoy hasn’t really done much in 12 years as a legislator that can be used as a barometer of what he intends to do, as critics of Aquino have repeatedly pointed out.

And now that the warm, fuzzy feeling that enveloped the country in yellow overnight after Cory’s death seems to be dissipating, Aquino seems lost. Like a mirror reflecting light from the fading source of his dead relatives, Noynoy seems unable to generate brilliance on his own—brilliance that he sorely needs, if he is to last until the day of reckoning in May.

Speaking of Noynoy’s relatives, a strange incident took place recently at one newspaper that is widely believed to be supporting Aquino. It seems that the newspaper’s Web site, which carries late-breaking updates of same-day events, carried a report about Noynoy’s sister Ballsy (or Maria Elena C. Aquino-Cruz, if you prefer) explaining the reason for the poverty of the farmers at the family-owned Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac.

According to Noynoy’s sister, the Luisita farmers are poor not because of anything their clan has done but because they do not practice family planning.

“Palaki nang palaki ang kanilang pamilya. Hindi nakakaya. Magkano lang ang kanilang kinikita? Siyempre pag hinati yun, siyempre paliit ng paliit,” said Ballsy Aquino-Cruz when asked about the conflict between the Cojuangco family and the Luisita farmers during a campaign sortie of the Liberal party somewhere in Southern Luzon.

Cruz took pains to explain that because the Aquino family hacienda was redistributed through a stock dispersal option instead of divided into small farmlots to the tenants like most big landholdings that came under the land reform program, the farmers effectively became part owners of the land without the government paying anything to the original owner. But because the company was losing money, the farmers could not expect to gain any profit themselves, even when revenue comes in like the P80 million in right-of-way payments it received from the government for the construction of the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway.

“Hacienda Lusita is a corporation. It has lots of debts. The money was not divided among shareholders and instead, it went to the company,” Cruz explained in the report. “Just like any other company, fine if it gains profit, and sorry if it does not. Just wait for the next time.”

Cruz’ statements are just the latest in the long line of poorly thought-out responses being made by Noynoy’s camp to the charges levelled against its candidate. And these are just the sort of off-the-cuff statements, like Noynoy’s “bought-in-Quiapo” dismissal of survey results, that widen instead of narrow the gap between Aquino and the people he says he wants to serve.

Most people, after all, will agree that poor people are that way because they have far too many offspring. But to discredit the sufferings of the farmers at Luisita—some of whom have already died violently because they want the land that they till given to them, just like in other big farms—is just irresponsible.

Of course, Cruz was just probably speaking from the heart, even if insensitively so, from her hacienda-owning point of view. But that’s not what’s really strange about this story.

Cruz made the remarks last Sunday, and the story was posted promptly on that day, as well. But the report never made it to the actual newspaper yesterday, even if it was a really slow day, news-wise.

by Jojo Robles of Manila Standard

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