Mar Roxas offer to Grace Poe to ‘unite’ against Duterte backfires badly!

May 7, 2016

by benign0

Such a bald act of desperation! Mar Roxas’s idea of reaching out to rival Grace Poe in these presidential elections is to issue a veiled request for her to back down from the race for the sake of “unity”. Roxas, of course, has consistently trailed Poe in various credible surveys. So it does not make sense that the outcome of a team up to “save the country from a [Rodrigo] Duterte presidency” would involve Poe quitting the elections.

What is worse is the way Roxas’s minions kicked into action within minutes of Poe declining the offer. Manuel L Quezon III who is a member of the Malacanang communications team immediately tweeted…

Grace Poe says NO to calls for unity vs dictatorship…

…as if (1) Poe’s decline was meant to be a refusal to a proposition to “save” the Philippines and that (2) a Duterte presidency would necessarily be a dictatorship.

That Quezon, the Noted One no less, would be so quick to make a statement on the back of two flawed assumptions in an attempt to shed a bad light on Poe is just plain un-classy. It, instead, casts light upon the reality that the two “men” behind the Liberal Party’s ill-fated effort to remain in power past 2016 are nothing but a couple of spoiled brats. Roxas, as we know, is the son of illustrious parents just like his boss current President Benigno Simeon ‘BS’ Aquino III is the golden boy of revered “heroes” Ninoy Aquino and Cory Aquino.

Spoiled brats, after all, are used to making “requests” that are expected to be accepted. It is hardly surprising then that Roxas’s ill-conceived tactical move badly backfired. He and his camp went down the easy but presumptuous path and failed to map out a Plan B (i.e., in the event Poe declined — which she did!). Were they really that dumb to actually think that a candidate well ahead of them in the polls would accede to such an offer?

It does seem so, although desperate times breed desperate acts. Roxas’s offer to Poe was easy to refuse. As Poe herself maintained, there really is nothing to discuss. There was nothing in it for her, nothing that Roxas could offer other than the lame fear mongering that Duterte’s rise to power would necessarily lead to the very death of the Philippine nation.

Roxas and his campaign team, once again, seriously misread the situation. Duterte is on his way to becoming President of the Philippines. He got to this point on the back of broad-based public dissatisfaction (at worst, disgust) with the way President BS Aquino’s administration (of which Roxas was a key part of) performed. This is something Roxas cannot fix this time.

For that matter, why be scared of a Duterte presidency? Rather than be scared, Filipinos should be excited. Duterte is different, unprecedented, and an outsider and, being so, will likely see the Philippines’ situation through a lens vastly different to the one Imperial Manila’s traditional politicians have been peering through for decades. The alternative is to vote back into office the sons and daughters of traditional oligarchs and then foolishly expect change.