2016 presidential election down to a battle between 2 bets

As the moment of truth nears, it has become very clear that only two presidential candidates may slug it out in the final lap in the race to Malacañang: Grace Poe and Jejomar Binay.

Rodrigo Duterte may have charisma, but he has no machinery that can spell the difference between keeping his votes and being robbed of them. Mar Roxas is simply so dull and boring we even don’t know what more to say about him. And what the heck is Miriam Defensor Santiago still doing in the race?

Let’s “bottom-line” the frontliners. Poe’s run is being hobbled by persistent doubts that, being a foundling,  a mere “pulot,” she may not be a “natural-born” Filipino. Worse, she may be an American at heart, her whole family being American citizens. A hypocritical justice of the Supreme Court who dissented with the dread of waking up one morning to find this beloved country of his being run by a foreigner, slammed the majority of his colleagues for glossing over the citizenship issue!

On the other hand, Binay is grappling with multiple corruption issues in the Ombudsman determined as hell to put him and his family behind bars on charges of having stolen billions of pesos in public funds during their stranglehold of the richest city in the country. Binay has the formidable edge: nationwide machinery courtesy of mindlessly fanatic followers in the APO fraternity and sorority, the Boy Scouts of the Philippines, the sister-cities mafia—with tons of money to throw around, to boot!

Only one question for the Filipino voter: Who would you choose? The one who is perceived to be less than a natural-born Filipino whom no one suspects will steal a single centavo; or the other who is perceived to be a full-blooded, natural-born Filipino who refuses to answer charges that he is in the habit of “overpricing” government projects by as much as 1,000 percent with all that surplus money going to his own pockets?

—CARMELA N. NOBLEJAS, [email protected]