Noynoy: Running on empty?

from LowDown by Jojo Robles (The Manila Standard Today) Jan 13, 2010
http://www.manilastandardtoday.com/insideOpinion.htm?f=2010/january/12/jojorobles.isx&d=2010/january/12

From Noynoy Aquino, speaking about his accomplishments prior to seeking the presidency, we learn that he was instrumental in the success of the Nike brand in the Philippines. And all along, I thought that was something that basketball superstar Michael Jordan laid claim to.

At the first clear sign showing that his closest rival in the presidential race is gaining on him, Aquino hits the panic button. During a debate over the weekend after the Social Weather Stations polling outfit showed that his once-humongous survey lead over Manny Villar had narrowed to 11 percentage points, Aquino suddenly started slamming surveys in general.

Some surveys, he commented during a debate with Villar and Dick Gordon at the Dela Salle Zobel school in Alabang, can be purchased in Quiapo. With that one snarky remark relegating public-opinion polls to the level of pirated DVDs and homemade abortion recipes, the only son of Ninoy and Cory seemed to reveal a lot about how he would handle pressure and adversity, something that not a lot of us had any idea of heretofore.

Indeed, if the latest SWS survey indicated anything, it’s the obvious fact that Aquino had better start riding on the coattails of his illustrious dead parents less and begin showing us who he really is more. And what we’ve seen so far, we can’t say that we really like.

Speaking of the latest SWS poll, it’s interesting to note that one of its findings was that Aquino’s running mate Mar Roxas has widened his lead over Villar’s partner, Loren Legarda, even while Noynoy’s advantage over Manny dramatically dwindled. Roxas made the usual modest remarks about this development and did not even hint at the survey’s provenance anywhere near the Quiapo Church.

Roxas, to his credit, seems to have a better ability of rolling with the political punches. He’s trailed Legarda in previous polls and even had to slide down to the number two spot mostly against his will—but Mar never openly expressed his bitterness or frustration at the occasional low points that his political career (like every politician’s) goes through.

Not so Aquino, who followed up on his inexplicable attack on opinion surveys by detailing his own accomplishments, such as they are, including his aforementioned role in developing the Nike brand. Apparently stung by charges that his own (as opposed to his parents’ or even sister Kris’) resume is distinguished by a serious lack of experience in anything other than occupying his hometown’s congressional seat for nine years and spending three years so far in the Senate, Aquino proclaimed that, according one one obviously overawed newspaper report about Noynoy’s “experience in the private sector,” he was “a member of the team that helped Nike become popular in the country in the mid-1980s.”

Doing what, exactly? Well, from 1985 to 1986, Noynoy Aquino was retail sales supervisor and youth promotions assistant for Nike Philippines and later an assistant for advertising and promotion for Mondragon Philippines, which once held exclusive distributorship rights to the Nike brand.

For those who may find the name Mondragon familiar, that company was owned by flamboyant businessman and Ninoy-Cory supporter Jose Antonio “Speedy” Gonzalez. Upon Cory’s assumption to the presidency in 1986, Gonzalez was rewarded with the post of tourism secretary—and a scant two months later, was one of the principals in what former columnist Hilarion Henares called “the first post-Edsa scam,” the hush-hush sale at a bargain-basement price of high-value Philippine government property at 212 Stockton Street in San Francisco, hard by Union Square.

The Stockton property sale was investigated by the Senate blue ribbon committee shortly after Congress was reinstated, with as much fanfare and official hand-wringing that attend such probes conducted today. But while both Gonzalez and then-GSIS president Feliciano Belmonte Jr. were pilloried for it in the Senate and in the press, none of the dirt ever went up to President Cory Aquino—even if her son was employed by Gonzalez at the time.

Aquino’s short stint in a company not owned by his family—but owned by a close family friend—hardly qualifies as “experience in the private sector,” no matter how glowingly that is spun. But, for those who have swallowed the Noynoy myth without questioning, that period of accepting paychecks not signed by relatives or officials of the Philippine government must now rank up there with Manny Pacquiao’s use of those funky, bright-red lace-up boxing shoes as Nike’s first and only Filipino international product endorser.

Noynoy will have to do better than that in the days ahead, if he doesn’t want to see his lead in the surveys fritter away to truly panic-inducing margins as the afterglow of his mother’s death becomes more and more of a distant memory. His bumbling attempts at explaining his dwindling lead in the polls (by belittling surveys in general) and at burnishing his achievement-challenged resume (now that he realizes that he has to declare himself as something more than the least-accomplished of the Aquinos in public life) just leave most people, in a word, underwhelmed.

It may well be that Aquino himself has never been liked to any official indiscretion, as his boosters keep drumming into our heads. But at the moment, more and more people are starting to believe that that’s simply because he hasn’t really done anything yet.

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Perhaps if SWS stuck to traditional opinion polling more often, it would actually serve its purpose as an accurate indicator of the shifting winds of public opinion at any given point in time. For instance, by not employing its controversial “pick-three” method of choosing presidential candidates, the SM of survey companies was probably able to function as a more accurate weather vane for the popular sentiment.

Several times in this space, I have taken SWS to task for its practice of asking respondents to choose three candidates that they would likely vote for, even if voters really get to choose only one in an actual voting booth. And by not assigning descending weights to each of the three choices made by its respondents, SWS only succeeds in muddling the picture some more for people who want to make sense of what the public pulse is.

Let’s just hope that, like in its last survey, SWS sticks to more established polling methods for candidates instead of using confusing and often statistically-skewed systems like its “pick-three” polling. That way, they’ll enlighten people more—and lay themselves less open to the charge that they’re merely dreaming up their data in the shadow of the Black Nazarene’s basilica.