Teammates and champions
“It’s like being captain ball of a team,” said Sen. Pia Cayetano of her role as an endorser of candidates for tomorrow’s polls. “When you choose your possible teammates, you choose the most capable, most qualified and proven people to join your team. You choose the best.”
Which is why, in a press con last Friday, Cayetano joined another senator, the outspoken and feisty Miriam Defensor-Santiago, in making public their endorsement of senatorial candidate Risa Hontiveros.
“Other candidates have approached me and asked for my endorsement,” announced Santiago. “But my priority is to give support to Risa.”
That the two women senators would stand by Risa and raise her arms to signify their support for her candidacy may be understandable, because Cayetano was the main sponsor in the Senate, and Santiago the author, of the reproductive health bill, which Risa advocated and campaigned for even after she had left the House of Representatives.
In fact, critics and anti-RH activists seemed to have zeroed in on Risa in the runup to tomorrow’s elections. “Why engage in the politics of hatred?” Santiago wanted to know.
For her part, Hontiveros bemoaned what she called the “matinding pagkamuhi” (extreme dislike, to put it mildly) of some groups, who have expressed their feelings for (or against) her in leaflets, text messages, posters and even Sunday homilies and pastoral letters. But, she added, she was confident that in her campaign, platform and advocacy, she was “going in the right direction and right in my choice of allies.”
To this Cayetano added that Risa need not fret too much. “A lot of members of the Catholic clergy are also praying for us,” she assured her “adopted” sister.
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Risa says that should she be favored with a seat in the Senate, her other priorities will include the formulation of an “anticorruption index” that will “track the record of each department” in fighting this scourge of governance. Women’s health is not her only focus. With the RH Law in place, Risa says the next phase of advocacy for her is “universal health care,” with one goal being “a doctor in every barangay.” More broadly, says Risa, she is all for tapping the “social potential of every woman,” whose gifts for entrepreneurship and industry need to be encouraged to address the country’s poverty. Also a focus in this respect, Risa adds, is social protection for solo mothers, since she is herself a widow.
Aside from joining the Senate, Risa can also very well occupy a Cabinet post, suggested Santiago. Risa thanked the senator for this other endorsement, but demurred by stating that for now, she is devoting all her attention and energy on her run for the Senate.
With a little help from her friends, including two sitting senators, Risa may yet overcome the barriers put up by her relative lack of visibility and a “recognizable” surname. Here’s hoping the “new politics” of what Risa calls the “three Ps”—pera (money), patalastas (political advertisements) and political clan—will be overcome by “the revenge of ordinary citizens,” who will power her into a much-deserved place in the Senate.
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I know I’ve preached more than once in this space, especially as the countdown to tomorrow’s balloting nears, on the need for voters to study the candidates carefully, and use their own standards for integrity, eligibility and track record to make up their own list of people to vote for.
But sometimes, one can’t always practice what one preaches.
My work requires me to scrutinize each and every candidate on the national level, to follow their every appearance and utterance in debates, interviews, and promotional materials. But at the local level, the exchange between candidate and voter takes on a more personal aspect. Still, residing as we do on the very edge of “lower Antipolo,” and in a gated community at that, my family and most of my neighbors, I suppose, only fleetingly know of the individuals begging for our support and our votes. What I know of the candidates for local positions I glean from their posters as I pass by, and flyers that their supporters distribute door to door.
This year, though, the information has been particularly sparse. I suppose candidates and their machineries believe that their budgets are better served courting voters in the teeming informal-settler communities and residents in the city center, than going after picky suburban homeowners.
I have a source of voter information, though. These are my two house helpers, our kasambahay who have been with us for over a decade and who live in the communities on the hillsides of Antipolo. In fact, one of them has even signed on as a campaign worker for one mayoralty candidate, paying her a substantial sideline income, even as she whispers that she will probably vote for that candidate’s opponent.
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Anyway, while compiling our codigos (cheat sheets) for Monday’s exercise, I asked our cook who we should vote for at the local level, since she is much more acquainted with the candidates than we are.
“Oh, don’t vote for candidate A and candidate B,” she said, explaining that the two are “drunkards.” In fact, she said, her children dislike one candidate for councilor in particular because “he has our roads closed to the public whenever he hosts a drinking session.”
We put an “x” beside the names she mentioned, while we talked about the candidates she favors. If you can’t conduct due diligence for all the candidates, you might as well rely on those whose opinions and views you trust, or who have no agenda to sell. Thus are voter preferences made!
