Is Chiz a drag on Grace?
The concept and objective of a winning team is for all the members of the team to contribute and add to the strength and the winning potential of the team. This is true whether it be a basketball team, a management team or a candidates slate or line up for an election. For the coming presidential election, the candidates for president, the vice-president and the senatorial line up would be the lead team of the group. The candidates for the congressional districts, the mayoralty candidates and the rest of the local candidates are the supporting teams which are also very crucial, but takes a lesser role in the projection of the national team. The importance of this lead team in a national election cannot be overemphasized, that's why it is taking some time for the three political groups to come up with their vice-presidential candidate and their final line up for senators. So far only Grace Poe has announced a running mate in Chiz Escudero, and Mar Roxas and Jojo Binay are expected to announce their line up in the first week of October.
The recent poll surveys of SWS and Pulse Asia have all the three candidates on a statistical tie, given the margin of error of the surveys of 3%, even as Poe is still on top of the surveys. This situation makes the choice of the vice-presidential running mate for Roxas and Binay very important as their choices will add or diminish their poll ratings, and affect also the rating of the Poe-Escudero team.
At this time we will only evaluate the impact of Chiz on Poe's presidential candidacy since they are the only declared team at the moment, and Escudero's team up with Poe had long been a foregone conclusion since four months ago.
Escudero's current political and personal reputation is public knowledge as he had been in the political and social scene as senator and in his associations with celebrities. In the political front, he wanted to be the NPC presidential candidate in 2010 if Cojuangco had backed him up politically and financially. When this did not materialize, he ended up as Binay's campaign manager in the 2010 elections. He has been linked to Bobby Ongpin in terms of campaign contributions and financial support, and Mr. Ongpin has been linked to the financial scandals of the Binay family, and the anomalous sweetheart deals of the Arroyo government financial institutions with him.
Escudero is not perceived as a squeaky clean politician by the business sector and by the middle class. His personal life has also not been exemplary. After a break-up with his wife, he got enmeshed with trouble with his new in-laws very publicly. While these are now supposedly settled, the unsavory publicity lingers and affects his "trust factor." While very articulate, especially in Filipino, Chiz comes across to most listeners as conceited and "a know it all" who thinks that only he knows the answer to everything. He also projects an image as over-ambitious and a puppeteer.
In term of political clout and bailiwick, Chiz original strength was in the youth sector and urban areas. With the advancements in information and communication technology, the millennials have more choices now and Chiz is just one of them. Geographically, his being from southern Luzon, particularly Sorsogon, might still hold, but if Leni Robredo runs as vice-president of Roxas, they will surely divide the Bicol votes between the two of them. His hold on any of the party machinery is not firm but relies on the powers of that party. So the main fallback of the Poe - Escudero team is sheer popularity which relies primarily in the urban areas, particularly the major cities, and a lot of media publicity and advertisements. In this aspect, it will still be Grace Poe who has the star power and Chiz is the beneficiary. As a whole therefore, it seems that Chiz is more of a minus than a plus to the Grace Poe presidential run, and is a drag to Grace. But then, did Grace Poe had any other choice or a better alternative?
It just occurred to me that if Binay chooses Marcos as his vice-prsidential partner, we will have a "Jojo-Bongbong" team as candidates. This is typical Filipino descriptive nomenclature of repeating a syllable to denote smallness or a replica, such as "bahay-bahay," "tawo-tawo" or "bata-bata." I don't know if there is a symbolic or figurative meaning to this in the coming election, but I can also suggest that it can also be called the "Jo-Bong" team, which means a lot to Golf players.
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