The frantic search by presidential aspirant Mar Roxas for a runningmate in the 2016 presidential elections, and his consequent failure to find anyone, suggests only one thing - nobody wants to team up with him. There could be a number of reasons why nobody wants to team up with Mar. But at this point in the game, who cares about reasons when the bottomline is irreversible. Nobody wants to team up with Mar.
Things could get a little different if Mar allows the setup to be reversed, i.e. he slides down to vice president again. But that is too much for Mar. He has slid down once and he is not about to do it again. That is simply too much for the dignity of a scion of a proud political family that has already at one time occupied the highest pinnacles of power in this country.
Grandson to the late President Manuel Roxas and son to Senator Gerardo Roxas who was himself well on the way to the presidency before martial law interrupted the political plans of everybody with presidential ambitions, it came to being sort of a matter of course for Mar to also have longings of his own for the presidency. He was well on the way to running in 2010 when the death of someone changed the course of history for everybody.
Now it is Mar's rightful turn, the sole basis of which he was anointed by Noynoy Aquino over and above anyone else who might have a little more attractiveness. Under different circumstances, this combination of right and anointment, and coupled with a humongous campaign kitty built on hidden pork and captured savings in the budget, plus the potential for smart counting at the automated polls, one would have expected contingents of applicants to come crashing through the door.
But nobody seems interested in teaming up with Mar. So desperate has the search become that even Mar himself could not resist taking the cheap shot at Janette Garin, the accidental health secretary, simply because the combination of their names seemed appealing to Mar -- "MarGarin." Garin was naturally titillated. But it is a team-up that will surely break the Liberal Party apart.
If nobody stops that folly, the Liberal Party not only will end up with no president, it will also have not even a vice president. And so Mar quickly changed tack and there is now talk of a "Mar-Vi" in reference to a tandem with Vilma Santos, movie star turned politician wife of Senator Ralph Recto. The only problem with this formula is that "Mar-Vi" could see a repeat of 2010 and that year's emergence of an unforeseen "Noy-Bi."
Yes, I have already written here that Mar Roxas has all the means to win in 2016. And I think he will win, at least at this point. He has the party in power to back him up. He has Noynoy's anointment. The smart results from automated polls, if they can be trusted at all, can be trusted in favor of you-know-who. There is the hidden pork in the budget and the captured savings from an unspent budget.
In other words, everything is in place to make Mar win, that is except Mar himself. If Mar had been strong from the beginning, or at least strengthened by all the advantages of being the standard-bearer of the party in power, there would not even be any need for him to find a runningmate. If he can win, which he in fact can, given what I have already enumerated, there would not even be any need for a runningmate. He can always go it alone and to hell with anyone if they don't want to.
But precisely because Mar is not strong and hasn't been strengthened by all the plus factors enumerated above that he is in desperate search for a runningmate, Mar has to have a runningmate to come up with the illusion that his eventual win had been greatly aided by his partner. Without a runningmate, a Roxas win will look suspect to many, and rightly so.
Without all the plus factors so enumerated, Mar will not win. But because of these plus factors, and the certainty of a win that they guarantee, there is a need to make the win convincing, hence the need for a runningmate to complete the illusion. The problem is, nobody has seen the ruse. Instead, everything is taken very seriously. And by seriously is meant nobody can, for the life of them, believe that Mar can win. It is a matter of nobody wanting to side with a loser.
Again, I believe Mar will win, not because of his own merits but in spite of them. He will win because Noynoy and the Liberals will see to it that he does. The problem this creates is that nobody believes Mar can pull it off. To make it believable, he needs a runningmate to complete the charade. It is like a Catch-22 for Mar. He can win but nobody believes it. For anybody to believe it, he needs a runningmate. But no runningmate can be found who believes Mar can win.