Belmonte may run for president

Speaker Feliciano Belmonte has started shaking hands with anyone within reach. Is that a sign that he may finally run for president?

Belmonte has been under intense pressure from some members of the ruling Liberal Party to run as the party’s standard-bearer next year. But Belmonte says he is committed to support Interior Secretary Mar Roxas, the presumptive party candidate.

To be sure, Roxas’ ratings in the surveys are inching up and the ratings of Vice President Jejomar Binay are slowly going down. The LP members fear, however, that there may not be enough time for Roxas to overtake Binay’s lead by election time. So they are looking at Belmonte to be the LP candidate in 2016.

Belmonte would be a popular presidential candidate. Corruption would be the most important issue in next year’s presidential election. The frontrunner, VP Binay, is up to his neck in corruption accusations, which he does not want to answer in the Senate hearings. Which leads people to believe that they must be true. And the people are fed up with corruption. It is the single biggest cause of widespread poverty in the Philippines. Funds that can be used to generate jobs and provide assistance to the poor are being routinely stolen by corrupt public officials.

The Sandiganbayan and the Office of the Ombudsman, set up primarily to combat corruption, are very slow. A graft case in the Sandiganbayan takes from five to eight years to resolve. That is not a deterrent to grafters.

President Benigno Aquino III is the first president to mount an honest-to-goodness campaign against corruption. Under his administration, a former president is detained and is being tried, a chief justice was impeached and is now facing charges of tax evasion, a former Senate president and two other senators are detained and charged, other lawmakers and public officials and their accomplices are being sued and arrested—all for corruption allegations.

What will happen to this anticorruption campaign if VP Binay becomes president? Very likely, the detained senators, his partners in the United Nationalist Alliance, would be released and the charges against them dropped. With that as precedent, similar corruption cases against other officials and their cohorts would also be dropped. The nation would sink again into the quagmire of corruption that has bedeviled it for decades.

That is why the people and responsible members of the ruling party are afraid of a

Binay presidency. That is why they are looking at Speaker Belmonte as the candidate to pit against VP Binay. Belmonte, like Roxas, is seen as Mr. Clean.

For some strange reason, there seems to be some reluctance toward Roxas. But there is none toward Belmonte. And why not? In his long public career, Belmonte, who started out as a newspaper reporter, has proven to be a good and honest administrator. As head of the Philippine Airlines, he piloted it from a money-losing airline to a profitable one. As head of the Government Service Insurance System, he increased its income as well as the pensions and other services to its members.

As mayor of Quezon City, he transformed it from a debt-ridden city to the richest city in the Philippines, with bank deposits that are the envy of other local government units. As a congressman, he has not been linked to the pork barrel scam.

His supporters are confident that Belmonte will bring these qualities, expertise and cleanliness to the presidency if he runs and wins.

But there is one big stumbling block to his becoming a presidential candidate: He does not want to be one, so far. Will public clamor persuade him to change his mind?

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The hope, nay dream, of plotters to turn the rally to mark the 29th anniversary of People Power the other day into a People Power 3 that would force President Aquino to resign (in the same way People Power 2 drove President Estrada out of Malacañang) so they could take over, fizzled out when the militants who turned up at Edsa turned out to be sparse in number.

Why should it be otherwise? The plotters who want P-Noy to step down so a so-called National Transformation Council can take over cannot even say who would compose it. At a press forum last week, Norberto Gonzales, GMA’s national security adviser, and his cohorts were asked to give the names of those who would compose the council, but they could not give any. All they could say was that they would consult various organizations.

They were told: Why do you want P-Noy to step down now when you still don’t have anyone to replace him in running the government? You are putting the cart before the horse.

Answer: Oh, aaaah, hmmmph.

Why don’t you wait for the election which is only a year away and field your own candidates?

Answer: Because the automated voting machines cannot be trusted.

Shouldn’t you concentrate on those machines instead of wanting to replace the whole government? You want to burn the whole house down to get rid of a few mice.

Gonzales et al. kept repeating that Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno would head the council, but she has already said she does not want to get involved in any power grab.

Indeed, what the Gonzales-Cojuangco bunch wants to do is grab power without going through an election. In fact, the people behind the Resign-P-Noy movement have all been defeated in previous elections and know that they cannot be elected even as barangay captain. The only way is to seize power illegally.

Do they realize that they are liable for criminal charges because they are plotting to seize power from those duly elected by the people?