Political Tidbits
Noli and Villar are friendly rivals
By Belinda Olivares-Cunanan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:38:00 06/12/2008
ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp. says it will not negotiate for ransom for its team that was kidnapped in Sulu by an Abu Sayyaf faction. Armed Forces Chief of Staff Alexander Yano has also told the media that the Armed Forces would not negotiate, either. And rightly they shouldn’t, for to give in to the kidnappers would be to encourage more of these nefarious activities. This leaves the fate of the kidnapped media people in the hands of the local politicians, who have been successful in past kidnap negotiations. Our fervent prayers, however, go to the victims, especially to Ces Oreña Drilon, the daughter of my husband’s classmate at the Philippine Military Academy, Class of 1961, the late Brig. Gen. Bernabe Oreña, that all of them would emerge from this harrowing experience safe and unharmed.
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Defeated Hillary Clinton, in her concession speech in Washington, DC, noted that in her 40 years of public service that began right after her graduation from Yale Law School, there have been only three Democratic presidents out of the 10 elected in those decades (namely, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and her husband Bill Clinton, the only one reelected among them). Not coincidentally, over 30 states in the Union have been Republican strongholds for many decades. All these indicate the strength of the Republican Party in America’s heartland and the formidable battle that Democratic candidate Barack Obama faces.
But there is also the formidable candidacy of Republican candidate John McCain, whom Obama hopes to tie to George Bush, whose popularity rating is now at the all-time low of 27 percent. But Obama is not succeeding that much, judging from the fact that he and McCain are locked in a statistical dead heat (49 for him vs. 46 for McCain). This indicates that more voters regard the latter as independent of Bush.
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Then, too, there’s the sterling record of this US Naval Academy graduate who’s a scion of one of America’s proudest military families. His grandfather and father, John McCain Sr. and Jr., were four-star admirals, the first family in US history to achieve that distinction. His grandfather led the strongest aircraft carrier force of the Third Fleet in key battles during World War II while his father, a submarine commander in World War II, ended up as commander of all US forces in the Pacific during the Vietnam War. McCain III himself was a naval aviator shot down over Hanoi and seriously wounded in 1967. When Vietnamese officials realized he was the son of a top commander, they offered to release him early, as a biographer put it, in order to embarrass the US. But “acting from a sense of honor taught him by his father and the [naval academy], he refused the offer and was tortured, held in solitary confinement and imprisoned for 5 ½ years.” He likes to say that because he suffered so much in the war, he would fervently bring the current war to an end. Returning to America, friends invited him to work in the US Congress as military adviser to certain politicians and he ended up getting elected to the US Senate for 24 years.
McCain’s big drawback is not Bush, as the polls show, but age (he’s 71 years old, with some physical disabilities from the war); but his battle cry, “leadership with experience” and “a leader you can trust,” which plays on the inexperience of Obama in foreign affairs, projects the ring of stability and sincerity. On the other hand, Obama banks on his immense charisma with the young people, his colorful life as an ethnic minority and his organizational capabilities. A most interesting fight this November.
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The popular belief is that it will be Vice President Noli de Castro and Senate President Manny Villar who will slug it out ultimately in the presidential election of 2010. At a dinner tendered by Rep. Jose de Venecia for visiting Malaysian leader Anwar Ibrahim, I asked Villar about this prospect and in typical fashion he smiled and said with some hesitation, perhaps so. But he stressed that he and VP de Castro had agreed that up to the time it became really clear that it would be they who would battle in the election they would say nothing negative against each other and instead continue being good friends and regularly meet for dinner with other members of what has come to be known in the Senate as the “Wednesday Club.” And even if they finally do battle against each other, said Villar, they’ll seek to conduct it on a high plane. Good enough.
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The Italian Embassy in Manila, led by Ambassador Rubens Anna Fedele, is famous for staging lovely national day celebrations. Last year it held a fashion show of Italian clothes at the Coconut Palace, and last June 2, it held a mini-concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila on Roxas Blvd., featuring a tribute to famed Italian composer Giacomo Puccini on the occasion of his 150th birth anniversary, as interpreted by Filipino talents. It was a most enjoyable example of Italian-Filipino collaboration, attended by no less than Secretary Alberto Romulo. Well-known soprano Rachelle Gerodias and upcoming tenor Al Gatmaitan, both of whom had trained in Italy, rendered arias from “La Boheme,” “Tosca” and “Gianni Schicchi” and Guiseppe Verdi’s “La Traviata,” while the UST Symphony Orchestra under conductor Herminigildo Ranera and pianist Jourdann Petalver, a Milan scholar of Philippine ambassador to Italy Philippe Lhuillier, rendered pieces from Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi and Filipino composer Felipe Buencamino. The tribute for putting the concert together goes not so much to Ambassador Fedele but to his wife Cosetta who coordinated it closely with the University of Santo Tomas Conservatory’s director, pianist Raul Sunico. Orchids to the Italian Embassy.
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Listen to newly elected president of the Union of Local Authorities of the Philippines (ULAP), Mandaluyong Mayor Ben-Hur Abalos, who also heads the League of City Mayors, as he talks about big plans for this giant umbrella organization of elected local officials this Sunday at 8 pm. at the dzRH radio program that Cecile Alvarez and I host.
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