In ABS-CBNNEWS.COM, Today newspaper weighs in with a trenchant editorial on the Marcoses’s embracing Fernando Poe, Jr., and asks why the Marcoses have such a genius for messing up the campaigns of their surrogates.
The recently publicized FPJ rally in the Ilocos, which featured a panalopy of Marcoses sharing the stage with FPJ (and which resulted in FPJ’s paying homage to Marcos’s waxen remains and Enrile apologizing to the Ilocanos for Edsa), indicates a latent anti Marcos vote.
One of the stories that remains to be told concerning this campaign concerns Imee Marcos’s decision not to pursue her quest for the senate. My reading is that she realized that the country’s is still unprepared for putting a Marcos in the senate and thus, on the road to the presidency.
At the time I told colleagues that this election may mark the last time an anti Marcos vote will manifest itself. The genuine anti Marcos diehards are dying off; the younger generation of post Edsa voters has neither memory of martial law nor a strong antipathy for Ferdinand Marcos (they don’t have a strong admiration, either; they simply don’t care; it is part of the inevitable shift in generations).
But for now, Marcos can still be a liability. The Left, in tactical alliance with FPJ, is upset, presenting yet another crack in the crumbling facade of the FPJ campaign. The undecided may take FPJ’s loyalty to Marcos as a negative. The whole thing is redounding to the benefit of the president who, despite her detractor’s comparing her, ironically, to Marcos circa 1969, still subconciously appeals to a revision of the nation’s verdict in 1965, which led to her father’s defeat and Marcos’s first victory on the road to dictatorship.
