It’s really pathetic the way presidential candidate Mar Roxas scrounges around for some sucker willing to run as Vice President with him under the Liberal Party (LP) banner. Indeed, it’s the height of pathos that he’d actually issue such a proposal to Senator Grace Poe, who currently tops popularity polls and will likely beat Roxas if she decides to run for president herself.
You gotta pity the Liberal Party. They are, to be fair, saddled with a debt of gratitude to Mar Roxas who, in 2009, would have been their presidential candidate had Benigno Simeon ‘BS’ Aquino III not demoted him to a vice presidential candidacy. Back then, Roxas (who had a track record only as a legislator) would have had a chance. As a legislator then, Roxas had no track record of administrative or executive performance that could be subject to public scrutiny yet. Without that experience, the incompetence he would go on to exhibit to the world as a Cabinet secretary from 2010 to the present did not exist yet.
It’s payback time. And so here we are seeing the LP sheepishly putting the unwinnable Roxas forward as their presidentiable. What a big cringe and an even bigger tragedy for the venerable Liberal Party of the Philippines.
Things are vastly different today for Roxas. After a spate of lame and misguided publicity stunts, embarrassing gaffes showcased by his wife Korina Sanchez, his fatal botching of disaster preparation in the lead up to the Haiyan disaster of 2013, the appalling incompetence in the response and relief management that he oversaw in its aftermath, and, recently, the outrage in the way he spinelessly dropped the ball in the midst of the fallout following the cold-blooded massacre of 44 elite Filipino police officers in Mamasapano, we wonder what is it exactly that motivates Mar Roxas.
Roxas has no saintly or heroic dead parents with which to milk the Filipino emo character, no personal brand to leverage in his pitch to the Filipino voter, no dancing or singing talent, no celebrity shine, no appeal to the youth, no good looks and no personality. For some semblance of a platform (which does not add much value to the be-all-end-all metric of winnability to begin with) he merely makes like a parrot and squawks his boss’s Daang Matuwid (“straight path”) platitude ad nauseum.
We wonder then what value Mar Roxas really is to the Liberal Party.
For that matter, what does he actually have to offer to anyone dumb enough to agree to run as his Vice President?
The worst experience a team player could possibly go through is to be the goatof the game. When you fail to score that three-point shot your team worked hard to set you up for in the last 10 seconds of a game in which your opponent leads by two points, guess what, you become crowned the Goat for Life.
It was bad enough Mar Roxas bent over and made himself President BS Aquino’s welcome mat into Malacanang in 2009. Now here he is setting himself up to be the Liberal Party’s goat.
Even now, we can already see that fitting end to the political career of a man who reached for the stars but hit the ceiling of his doghouse before he could stretch his arms past his pointed head.
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