Complicated

It was a match-up that could have happened, but did not.

Months before the deadline for filing of certificates of candidacy, there was a lot of speculation about a match-up between Rodrigo Duterte and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. That might have been a viable alliance, combining Duterte’s clout among Mindanao voters with Marcos’ revived “Solid North.”

The match-up did not happen, as we know. Duterte dilly-dallied and eventually failed to file his certificate of candidacy for the presidency. Bongbong Marcos, adrift for a while, eventually hitched his vice-presidential candidacy with the rather flighty presidential bid of Miriam Defensor Santiago.

Marcos, field reports tell us, worked assiduously but quietly on establishing a strong grassroots network to support a national bid. As a result, he is now generally considered a strong contender for the second-highest post in the land.

We do not see the same sort of effort at constituency building on the Santiago camp. Sen. Miriam Santiago said she will campaign from home using social media. Although that might be a workable strategy to adopt, it is untested.

The Santiago-Marcos partnership is, to put it lightly, a strange one. They have yet to appear in a public event together. No caucus of forces has been reported. No convergence of political resources is detected. Of course, the consolidated program of government is expected.

This is a marriage of convenience, of course. But it looks worse than a loveless marriage.

Since last week, however, strange sounds have emanated from the Duterte camp. It seems the mayor is now willing to take a shot at the presidency. He professes disappointment over the SET ruling on the disqualification case against Sen. Grace Poe and uses that as an excuse to revive a presidential bid he himself declared to be dead and buried.

There are some impediments to hurdle, however.

Beyond the prescribed period for filing certificates of candidacy, the only way Duterte may rejoin the presidential race is as substitute candidate for a party-mate. The PDP-Laban prepared for such an eventuality. The party fielded barangay captain Martin Dino as its presidential bet, although there appears to be some irregularity in the certificate he filed.

Dino has since withdrawn, averting the possibility he be declared a nuisance candidate. The party now seems ready to declare Duterte as its bet, if that is possible under the rules.

The revived possibility of a Duterte presidential run also apparently revives Marcos’ interest in hitching his presidential bid with the southerner. The combination of a strong Mindanao vote consolidated with a “Solid North” vote is again being talked about.

But there are complications to this, too.

It will be awkward for Bongbong to “divorce” his vice-presidential bid from the obviously disinterested presidential bid of Santiago. All alliances of convenience are loveless, but publicly announced pacts are never broken.

Besides, Duterte is in some acknowledged alliance of convenience with Alan Peter Cayetano. The mayor has said that if ever he runs for president, Cayetano will be his running mate – if only for the fact that the senator constantly lurks around him.

For his part, Cayetano has put out thousands of tarpaulins obviously advertising his alliance with Duterte. It is clear he is presenting himself as Duterte’s running mate. The mayor could not possibly spurn such an assiduous suitor.

There is no PDP-Laban position on this partnership. The party is so reduced it could not possibly have a say on the matter. Its only hope for averting a slide into obscurity is to latch on to a possible Duterte presidency.

Nor does the passive Nacionalista Party (NP) have any role to play. Cayetano, Marcos and one Antonio Trillanes, all nominally members of the NP are rivals in the vice-presidential race. 

As Marcos is in a dispassionate tandem with Santiago, Trillanes is in some unwanted partnership with Grace Poe. Although Grace Poe is in a publicly recognized team-up with Francis Escudero, Trillanes declares Poe to be his presidential candidate – making him some sort of political interloper.

Our political party system has so degraded we now find ourselves in some sort of electoral orgy among the candidates. Every partnership seems, well, complicated.

Callous

President Benigno Aquino may, characteristically, be inclined to protect the incompetents he appointed to sensitive public offices. But he, in the case of the “tanim-bala” scandal particularly, need not demonstrate so much callousness in trying to do so.

The latest version of reality coming out of the Palace is that the “tanim-bala” scandal is something media merely blew out of proportion. It could in fact be a political conspiracy to humiliate the President – for which the appropriate investigation has been ordered by the powers-that-be.

The President even used the prostituted statistics deployed earlier by Jun Abaya. He set the recorded cases involving bullets found in luggage against the total number of passengers going through the NAIA. That, of course, produces a miniscule ratio of arrested passengers to the total universe.

The prostituted statistics not only miss the point. They are also plain wrong. The recorded cases do not at all represent all the innumerable instances where passengers chose to bribe rather than be hassled, which is the whole point of the racket.

The bullets were, after all, not planted to build cases against hapless passengers. They were planted to extort cash in exchange for not recording the discovery.

In the process of protecting his incompetent appointees by constructing a conspiracy theory about the whole controversy, Aquino communicates only one thing: he does not really care about the welfare of our air commuters.