2022 Philippine Elections

The election playoffs

Glenda Gloria

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

The election playoffs
It’s when presidential hopefuls mount trial balloons; say things, attend events, and fly to certain areas to catch attention; meet with people and share a meal with them purely for Facebook purposes. There’s a lot of noise, a lot of foreplay, a lot of spin.

If a dog bites a man, that’s not news. But if a man bites a dog, well…

To veteran journalists like me, spotting the news back in the day was almost cut-and-dried. The newsroom tyrants (read: our editors) would check our leads and know immediately whether our drafts were worth their time or should be thrown in the trash bin, which was always under every editor’s desk.

Fast forward to now, when everyone can be a newsmaker and a “reporter” in an instant, and you begin to understand why news judgment has become a complex affair. 

An election season, such as what we have now, adds to the blur.

So what if Ilokano politicians traveled all the way to Davao City to greet the presidential daughter a happy birthday? So what if a political has-been managed to revive chatter on him by making the same pilgrimage to the country’s most favored city?

Had these two visits occurred last year, they would not have merited space on Rappler. But to ignore them now would have been to ignore what we know to be true: an earnest, funded, determined effort to field Sara Duterte for a presidential run in 2022.

Even then, the editors spewed a lot of ughs and arghs before finally putting the Marcoses’ and the Teodoros’ Davao trips in the Inside Track section, Rappler’s intelligencer on people, events, places and everything of public interest. 

We are in the election playoffs, after all. 

It’s when presidential hopefuls mount trial balloons; say things, attend events, and fly to certain areas to catch attention; meet with people and share a meal with them purely for Facebook purposes. There’s a lot of noise, a lot of foreplay, a lot of spin.

Not all that’s said in these playoffs is true, not all that happens is real. It’s the season of elimination for political players and camps wanting to up their leverage for whatever deals they’re cutting or intending to cut with various power and money blocs. 

We, editors, keep this in mind as we exercise judgment on every politician’s play between now and the day they make an official declaration, which could be in the next couple of months, and up to when they file with the elections commission in October. 

There is no hard-and-fast rule in dropping or pursuing playoff stories; we rely on the facts before us and what they could mean or lead to, as well as our instincts and knowledge of what’s happening behind the scenes.   

So what are we seeing through these playoffs? 

  • My own reading of Senator Panfilo Lacson’s statement that, should he decide to run for president, he is sure to have Senate President Tito Sotto as his running mate, is this: I think he is telling us that he’s not going to slide down to the vice presidency. It’s the presidency or nothing for the 73-year-old senator. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, as a vice-presidential post for an experienced executive like him is nothing to sneeze at.
  • We’re not taking at face value President Duterte’s words about 2022. On Tuesday, June 8, he said he was “resisting” his party mates’ plea for him to run for vice president. Our news editor reminded us that that’s an old Duterte narrative – resisting and then “giving in” to “public clamor.” Duterte also said he had advised his daughter Sara not to run for president. Who is he kidding? Every departing president, since Erap Estrada was ousted and jailed, wanted only one thing: to endorse a friendly – and winnable – candidate to replace him/her and keep him/her out of jail.
  • Is Vice President Leni Robredo running for president? Potential rivals want her out of the game because if she’s there, she would be a constant reminder of their own skeletons and past pacts with the devil. Without her in the field, it will all be muted colors against the incumbent regime. But I also believe it’s premature to assume – or expect – that she would indeed gun for the presidency, given her own understanding of the landscape and the key elements needed to win in 2022. 

The coming eight weeks should give us a better sense of the playoffs. It’s actually a bit late, according to our past election timetables. But it’s also our first pandemic in recent history.

As early as May 2015, a year before the 2016 races, then-presidential hopeful Jejomar Binay was already openly scouting for a running mate (he was rejected by Bongbong Marcos and Erap Estrada). By July 31, 2015, then-president Noynoy Aquino, after flirting with Grace Poe, finally endorsed Mar Roxas as the Liberal Party’s standard-bearer.

I say grin and bear it. The games will reach the finals eventually.

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