All her rivals deny they are behind the attacks on Grace. If nothing else, the attacks show that Grace has replaced Jojo Binay as the one to beat in 2016 in the eyes of her rivals and she is all but the next elected president. But let’s wait for the next survey, because the presence of Chiz in her campaign has started to generate a negative, if not repelling, reaction and I still believe that Mar, the last traffic-cum-flood notwithstanding, may yet win this race.
The attacks on Grace are commonplace in their vulgarity and revealing of their source, like that of being a maid beater. I think someone else takes the cake for that one. Equally revealing is what Grace has never been accused of: that she is stupid. She was a bright young thing from grade school through college in the United States. None of her rivals had a sterling academic record, none of them. I will slap anyone who disagrees with me on that score.
Some have spun her adoption into an admission that she was picked up from the street. Pulot lang sa kalye. Her mother answered this long ago. No, she told her little girl, you weren’t picked up from the street; you were found on the steps of a church, decked out nicely to show the depth of the loss felt by your natural mother, when she left you in God’s hands for a life that could only be better than she could ever give you. There’s a whole story right there, but Grace should not be the one to tell it as she did two weeks ago.
The problem with Grace is not lack of experience. I have shown experience to be a handicap in a presidential race. It destroys any rational hope in the candidate, going by his track record. I have shown that the office itself requires no special talent or dedication. It is the easiest job in the world and the useful parts of the job are done by the bureaucrats.
Indeed, getting elected to the presidency does not confer a sacred mandate, as the inevitably ignorant print and broadcast media like to say without any basis in law or political philosophy. It is just that the ignorant like the sound of the word mandate. It sounds important and revelational, which it isn’t.
Election is merely the expression of a commonplace and many times misplaced hope, whose disappointment is the greatest crime against the nation.
Despite the forced solemnity of TV coverage of inaugural affairs, the fact is there is nothing to it. The day the president-elect is sworn into office is like any day an accused takes the witness stand to defend himself—there is nothing special about either one.
An elected president deserves only to be shown the door at the end of the term, and unrelenting criticism in its duration. That keeps the president focused. The problem of Grace is bigger and more dangerous. It is losing what she already has: the mystique conferred by a foundling birth, which in our religion and that of the Hebrews shapes the fate and future of the nation that chooses a foundling to be its leader.
This mystique can be ruined by the kind of people who shape and lead her campaign: shysters from Congress; the same old faces from police lineups. Showbiz gives advantages, but it won’t convince voters much anymore. When showbiz last convinced voters to vote a celebrity to the presidency, they threw out their choice within years of his election. They might have been convinced again when another celebrity ran and was challenged to prove he was not what all true Filipinos wish they were: US citizens. A Filipino who says he doesn’t want to be anything but a Filipino is stealing in public office amounts that would land him in jail in the United States. But we will never know now. FPJ lost or was cheated.
Then as now, as a Liberal Party gnome warned Grace, “Popularity does not mean you won’t be cheated.”