THERE is no such thing as an electoral mandate. All that getting elected does is get you the job that was up for grabs. It certainly does not confer upon you something called a mandate. Nobody has seen a mandate. What color is it? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? No one can say because it doesn’t exist.
So, also is getting elected president not a matter of destiny, as Duterte said. It is not destiny but a matter of getting the most number of votes for the post. And that is a matter of getting the most voters to vote for you.
It does not stop there. It is also a matter of getting those votes counted correctly by the Commission on Elections (Comelec).
The Comelec can cheat you.
If the Comelec cheats for you, it is not destiny but electoral fraud. If the Comelec does not cheat you, it is not destiny either, but a clean election.
Getting the most number of votes can be a matter of coming across attractively in person or in media. It is not a matter of destiny but personality and peso-nality.
Someone decidedly not attractive, who had no money to start with, can, just by showing his face and talking, draw multitudes to himself. Someone else far more pleasing to look at may turn off as many as they see him or meet him in person or media. Destiny has nothing to do with it because destiny does not exist.
It is not a force of nature or a trend of history. It is just a word meaning nothing. We cannot explain how in hell an ugly madah fakah gets even his mother to vote for him, let alone her neighbors, not to mention a lot of his countrymen. But there you go.
It was Ferdinand E. Marcos who started this talk of destiny. Iginuhit sa—or ng—Tadhana was his first book, meaning “written” or “embroidered” on tadhana, whatever that sh_t native word means. And you know Marcos, he’d write anything. Even Corazon “Cory” Aquino picked it up and said it was not Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino’s destiny to be president.
Destiny had nothing to do with Ninoy not becoming president. When Ninoy was good and ready to run for president after Marcos’s second term, he could still have lost the nomination of his party, which was slated for Gerry Roxas. (That’s why Noy grabbed the nomination from Manuel A. Roxas II in 2010, to repeat history that never happened.) By then, Marcos could not run again so the post was up for grabs. Shortly after, Ninoy was in jail and presidential elections were canceled forever.
The reason there was a presidential election again was that Ninoy was murdered. So how could he run? He was dead. His murder got the nation to demand that presidential elections be called again. And the reason that Cory became president was not destiny, but because her husband was shot and Marcos called snap elections to show that most of the people did not believe he killed Ninoy. And the reason Cory won the election was that the voters were tired of Marcos and sick of his cronies. It was disgust and not destiny.
If you believe that destiny plays a part in the presidency, that lays the basis for the elected president to start stealing and calling it God’s will, or killing political enemies and critical journalists and calling it God’s justice, or keeping known Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo-era smugglers around him, getting them ready for customs jobs and calling it business as usual when he assumes office.
The Americans, the greatest people on earth, never use the word destiny. That is because they are not short and stupid, but tall and talented. There is really something wrong with short people. Americans do not cotton to nonsense. They stick to common sense, which tells us that if we cannot see it, or count it, or smell it—then goddamn it, it does not exist. There is no such thing as destiny.