Being more discerning

With less than three weeks remaining before election day, many voters are still undecided whose name they will mark in their ballots.

Track record remains key. For how else do we know if the ones who we will choose will deliver. For our legislators, including party-list representatives and councilors in the provincial, city, and municipal level, we have to find out what bills or resolutions they have sponsored and whether or not these have become laws or ordinances.

For other local government officials holding executive functions, well, the quality of life in their respective territories speaks for itself.

There are those who used to hold legislative functions and are now seeking executive offices and vice versa. Take the case of JV Ejercito Estrada, mayor of San Juan for several terms and former congressman.

Surveys of voters’ preferences for the past six months have consistently shown that JV would be one of the topnotchers in this year’s senatorial race. The latest survey released last April 16 showed JV, son of former President Joseph Estrada, occupying the fourth-to-fifth places along with Nancy Binay, his co-candidate in the UNA slate. 

In the October 2012 survey, JV was in seventh place, with 37 percent of the respondents saying they would vote for him.  The latest poll six months later showed that JV has improved his standing to fourth to fifth place, with the voting scheduled barely a month away.  Poll experts believe that as the actual voting draws nearer, JV will even improve his standing, or at least solidify his hold on one of the Senate seats. 

Other surveys have likewise consistently placed JV in the winning column of the Senate contest.  The survey by the Social Weather Stations released last March showed JV Estrada as number three among the senatoriables, up from 9-10 in the SWS February polls.  Pulse Asia surveys also placed him at No. 5 in January and No. 9 in March. 

Election experts expect that JV will further improve his standing as the polls draw nearer.

We have to admit that when he was just starting in Philippine politics, his being the son of Erap helped jumpstart his political career. But longevity in politics requires more that pedigree. And because of this, JV has the advantage. As mayor of San Juan for three terms, JV led San Juan’s economic boom from 2001 to 2010.

Records show that under his leadership, San Juan posted a huge increase in revenues, from P300 million to P1 billion in just nine years. Because of its phenomenal growth, San Juan was converted into a highly urbanized city in June 2007.

Later, as the representative of San Juan in Congress, JV was the chairman of the House Committee on Metro Manila Development and vice-chairman of the House committees on labor and employment, and on local government. He was also a member of the committees on appropriations, energy, public works and highways, transportation, games and amusement, information and communications technology, and youth and sports, data furnished this writer disclosed.

JV is campaigning on a platform of “Ginhawa para sa Masa,” which covers four major components: education, workers’ protection, and Mindanao. The young lawmaker vows  to set up more socio-economic programs for the full-scale development of Mindanao and says he will work towards the immediate rehabilitation of the Agus-Pulangi Hydropower Complex.

A good education

Here’s another candidate who not only has the political pedigree but also a string of achievements to complement it.

Joseph Kennedy, the family patriarch , sent his son John F. Kennedy to the London School of Economics (LSE) to attend the lectures of the famous professor Harold Lasky. The patriarch felt that an obligatory  stop at the LSE would equip the  future president of the US with a solid grounding on political economy. Indeed, the LSE was founded by the Webbs on the premise that a school should  turn out intellectuals who are more than  willing to vigorously participate in the  shaping and molding of public policy.

One of the young candidates for the Senate did not just make a short stop at the LSE. He trained at the LSE for his undergraduate degree in political economy.  Aurora Rep. Edgardo “Sonny” Angara went through the obligatory Karl  Marx to Milton Friedman courses at LSE, with some heavy focus on Keynes, and the work of the couple that founded the LSE, Sydney and Beatrice Webb.

Sonny Angara’s legislative work – bills and advocacy –  tends to be Keynesian in the sense that he has been proposing government investments in areas where the government is the investor of last resort – and all other forms of stimulants are not available. This is not the kind of  government-investments-running amok, but strategic investments to build what Sonny calls the  “smart schools for the 21st century.” Meaning, investments in education which is even written down in the Philippine constitution. Or investments in health, so it would reach the  desired level of health investment to GDP ratio.

On his economic bills, in contrast, there is one dominant theme: straight –up boost to the private sector and making it easy for business to do business in the country.

The competence to contextualize things and not fall into the trap of dogmas when crafting legislation and making advocacies is all rooted in Sonny Angara’s serious academic preparation.

Even  in  the  legislative proposals that seek forceful  government investments and intervention, Sonny Angara often offers  throw-away words  that promote  the merit of involving the private sector even in the most basic government investments.  His school building proposals  are peppered with phrases such as “build-operate-transfer “ and “lease-transfer.” His agenda  to modernize schools and equip them with the latest tools of ICT is based on public-private partnership.

But even with his injection of modernity into the legislative process, he still believes that government should do the basic work of empowerment, such as his Free Kindergarten Act, the law to expand the benefits of the elderly and senior citizens  and his proposal to increase the pay of public school teachers to a decent bracket of P33,000 a month.

From LSE, I should mention this,  Sonny Angara went to  train at the UP College of Law and Harvard Law.

The  campaign staff of Sonny Angara, for not-too-clear reasons, has failed to stress on the serious academic preparation of the principal for his senate run. My sense is that they should not be coy about this. First, it would disabuse the minds of people who think that he is just banking on a surname to get elected. Senator Ed Angara, trained at one of the so-called “ Public Ivies” –  at the Ann Arbor flagship campus of the University of Michigan. Sonny trained at Harvard, one of the legit Ivy League schools. The truth is Sonny Angara’s academic preparation for public office is more serious and tougher than his father‘s.

It does not always follow that those who are superbly trained at the academies and universities are  better suited for public office than the intellectual slackers. But those who studied how the economic geniuses of the past and the present have shaped  public  actions, from the agreement at Breton Woods to funding world wars, or how they have provided the ideologies that had underpinned upheavals and revolutions, are more adept and capable at writing draft laws and giving flesh to the imperatives of 21st century legislation.

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