Between hope and despair

By John Nery
Philippine Daily Inquirer

The news from the provinces was late but bracing. On Dec. 15, the Man from Subic and the Woman from Cebu met--unexpectedly--at the launch of a new ship. They ended up launching another, decidedly more vulnerable, vessel: a trial balloon.

As trial balloons go, however, this was a blimp. "Sen. Richard Gordon and Cebu Gov. Gwen Garcia have stoked rumors of a potential administration-backed tandem in the 2010 polls after both politicians flirted with the idea of running together," Inquirer reporter Gil Cabacungan Jr. began his front-page story the other day.

To hear the principals speak, the idea was spur-of-the-moment. "That came out spontaneously," Gordon told me. "I nearly fell out of my seat."

A modest Garcia downplayed the form without denying the substance. "That's all there is to it, really," she said in a text message. "A teaser."

But spontaneous or not, there was definitely something combustible in the idea. Two capable executives (Subic Bay remains a template of development), two proven vote-getters (Garcia's margin in the last election was almost half a million votes, about twice the number of Pampanga voters who elected Among Ed Panlilio).

"We have the same political philosophy," Gordon noted. "It's always 'Can do.' It's always 'Nothing is impossible.' It's always 'Depend on your own.'"

Of course, it doesn't hurt that he hails from Luzon and can ignite a crowd, while Garcia speaks Visayan and sings like a star.

* * *

To be sure, the latest poll of 2010-bound presidential candidates I've seen (it's several months old) puts Gordon in the single digit, with Sen. Loren Legarda far and away the survey leader. And I'm not even sure if Garcia is on the list of possible vice-presidential candidates.

But current talk about the presidential race centers on the presumptive (or maybe even presumptuous) candidacies of Senators Manny Villar and Mar Roxas. They did not fare all that well in that survey I saw either, but the taken-for-granted viability of their candidacies is primarily financial. Villar is back in the ranks of the country's dollar billionaires, while Roxas is heir to an old-rich fortune. (Roxas, however, has a real party to back him up, unlike Villar, whose revived Nacionalista won't function without him.)

My point: It's early in the game, and it's still anybody's race. What the Gordon-Garcia "teaser" does is to de-privilege money as a factor of competitiveness. That might redefine the way the game is played.