Antonio C. Abaya - Chiz Bombs Out

It is getting harder and harder to take Sen. Francis `Chiz' Escudero seriously, if you ever did so in the first place.

Months before his birthday on October 10, when he reached the minimum age (40) for presidential aspirants, his people had been cultivating the hype that Chiz represented "change" in Philippine politics, in an obvious attempt to project him as the Obama of the Philippines.

But aside from the fact that both were young and ambitious, the only thing Chiz had in common with Obama was the shape of their craniums.

Obama sought to end Bush's war in Iraq, stitch together a health care system for all Americans, and extricate an economy that is deeply mired in recession.

I do not know what exactly it was that Chiz wanted to change in the Philippines other than, predictably, endemic graft and corruption under President Arroyo, with the equally predictable promise to bring about prosperity for all Filipinos.

But Chiz gave no details on how he was to combat graft and corruption, nor did he have any economic master plan to bring about the prosperity that he says he will create. In this sense, he was no different from nor better than the other presidential contenders and their usual motherhood statements: Noynoy Aquino, Manny Villar, Joseph Estrada and Gilbert Teodoro.

Noynoy, at least, had the clean reputation of his late parents to set as an example for him to emulate, and Villar, as a self-made billionaire, has had some first hand experience in creating wealth.

But Chiz, in his more than ten years in the Lower House and the Senate, has not really distinguished himself as either a relentless graft-buster or an innovative wealth-creator in his career as opposition legislator, only as a vocal critic of the Arroyo administration.

Nevertheless, he created waves as potential presidential contender in 2010, a young man in a hurry, in the mold â€“ so said his spin masters â€“ of Barack Obama, scoring high in public opinion surveys and capturing the attention of his audiences, especially the young, with his trademark monotone.

All of which came crashing down barely 18 days after his landmark 40th birthday, when he unexpectedly announced his sudden resignation from the Nationalist People's Coalition (NPC) of Danding Cojuangco, which had been his political home for the past 11 years and under whose patronage he was to launch his presidential bid for 2010.

Said he: "In my belief, whoever is planning to run for president of the country should not belong to any party. His only party should be the Philippines and his party mates are the entire Filipino people."

This is a lot of horse manure, and Chiz knows it. Manuel L. Quezon, first president of the Philippine Commonwealth, belonged to the Nacionalista Party when he first ran for president in 1935 and remained a party member until he died in 1944. The only Filipino president who did not belong to a party was Emilio Aguinaldo, who however took sides in the Magdalo-Magdiwang quasi-party squabbling during the Revolution.

Even the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin headed the Bolshevik faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in parliament in the 1900s. He recognized the need for "a small band of revolutionaries" to accelerate the allegedly historically inevitable evolution of society towards socialism and thence towards Communism. The Bolshevik Party eventually became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

If Chiz believes he can lead and run a political movement without a political party, then he is more naÃ¯ve and politically immature than I thought.

Continued Chiz: "Political parties had become obstacles to genuine and meaningful change. If a presidential candidate is beholden to his party, how can he make crooked government officials accountable if he belongs to the same party? I want to prove to you and to myself that I am doing this for the right reason, not for any interest. Not for just anyone, but for you, and for the motherlandâ€¦"

More horse manure. His hero, President Barack Obama, had no problem going after the crooked governor of his home state of Illinois, even though both of them were/are Democrats, after the governor (Blagojovich) tried to sell Obama's former seat in the Illinois legislature to the highest bidder.

Chiz' problem with the NPC was neither political nor ideological. It was purely financial. For years, Chiz played along with the NPC Godfather, Don-ding Corleone Cojuangco, as the party's fair-haired Golden Boy for 2010, with no apparent complaints from Chiz about not being free to make decisions for himself.

But with the sudden prominence of Cojuangco's nephew, Noynoy Aquino, as a viable presidential contender and possible winner in 2010, Cojuangco apparently had second thoughts about supporting Chiz, who was coming in as a fading third or fourth placer in public opinion polls.

I can believe the story in the October 29 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer that Chiz could get only P100 to P200 million from the NPC, instead of the P5 billion that his handlers needed for a successful presidential campaign. Which compelled Chiz to suddenly resign from the NPC. It is all about money, not about high-minded political altruism.

Which is why his valedictory at Club Filipino dripped with spiteful and rancorous asides towards the rich. I am surprised that neither the Inquirer nor the Standard Today â€“ the only newspapers that I see on a daily basis â€“ carried a full translation of Chiz' bitter parting words in Pilipino.

His populist anti-rich rhetoric was music to the ears of Communist party-list congressmen. His advocacy of a mandated raise in the minimum wage endeared him to the Communist KMU labor federation, but showed his ignorance of how wages in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore reached First World levels without the crutch of a minimum wage law.

Which led me to conclude in my column of October 28, titled Looking for Mr. Goodbar, that Chiz was "intoning an atypical class war against his erstwhile billionaire backerâ€¦.and that he may postpone his run for the presidency to 2016."

Which is what he actually did yesterday, Nov. 24, when he announced that he was withdrawing from the 2010 presidential and vice-presidential elections. Having lost the financial support of Danding, which forced him to resign from the NPC, and having nowhere else to go, Chiz had no choice but to bomb out.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. He is still very young. He will be only 47 in 2016.

He has enough time to bone up on political science and development economics, and involve himself in two or three major advocacies where he can develop a more mature and realistic economic-political line and grow into a more knowledgeable presidential contender in 2016.

Reactions to tonyabaya@gmail.com or tony_abaya@yahoo.com

Other articles in www.tapatt.net and in acabaya.blogspot.com