Regardless of whether or not Vice President Jejomar Binay managed to speak during yesterday’s Sinulog Grand Parade presentation, he and the other presidentiables are scheduled to present themselves and their programs of governance in debates mandated by the Commission on Elections (Comelec).
Comelec chairman Andres Bautista warned that those who fail to attend the debates are sending a message to the public that they are cowards.
“Kung hindi sila pumunta sa mga debate, ito ay mensahe na rin (If they don’t go to these debates, it is also a message),” he told reporters.
Whether he was referring to Binay or not, the Comelec chairman need not say. The vice president has become a front-runner in the surveys lately, no thanks to the mostly unfavorable rulings against then leading presidential aspirant Sen. Grace Poe and equally unfavorable public opinion against Davao City Mayor Rodrigo
Duterte’s cursing, particularly his rant against Pope Francis.
It’s a tribute to the vice president’s persistence that he managed to overcome the backlash over his refusal to show up at Senate blue ribbon committee hearings through his constant countryside forays.
How the Comelec debates will impact on his standing in the surveys, no one can tell but considering the infighting among Comelec officials and the negative fallout it generated, Bautista’s warnings could be either dismissed or treated as a joke by the Binay camp.
Still, it remains to be seen how much of a barometer the Comelec debates will serve to gauge public sentiment on every candidate. Most likely the candidates will attend the debates out of a sense of compliance but how these debates will be structured is critical in determining whether it does the job of fully informing the public about the candidate’s capacity and soundness of his or her program of governance.
The debates may or may not be jointly televised by the country’s leading networks, which will schedule their own debates for the national candidates, including the senators.
Against this backdrop, will Binay – who avoided any public discourse except those he and his camp had personally programmed – attend? Whether he attends or not doesn’t matter to the public, who have four other choices to pick from for their next president.
What does matter is what these candidates eventually bring to the table. For once, the voting public should look beyond the political ads, the sloganeering and the deodorized campaign speeches and look hard at what each of them stands for and whether any of them brings unwanted baggage such as graft cases and citizenship issues that will weigh them down.
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