Leni must learn to be her own person

Right off, let me say that I do not really like Leni Robredo. But it is not because I think she is a bad person or anything like that. I started not liking Leni Robredo the moment she started believing the things the political opposition must have sweet-talked her into running for vice president. The vice presidency is a heartbeat away from the presidency. She could be president anytime. Why an amateur like her believed she could be one nettles me.

The presidency is not a job that you train for as you go. When you are president you hit the ground running, except that you are not running just for yourself, your family, or even your reputation. You run for and with the whole country on your back, which happens to be 110 million bickering Filipinos beset by a pandemic, harassed by China, exploited by the United States, savaged by corruption and drugs, and distracted to no end by communists.

Leni as vice president has shown not an iota of the stuff of which Filipinos might be convinced she can capably handle any of the above-mentioned problems either individually or all of them together at once. What Leni seems to be very good at is to criticize and complain, which is in essence the surest signs of emptiness and incompetence. It is terrifying to think she could be suddenly president and with the thought not crossing her mind.

True, the president and Leni belong to different sides of the political fence. But Leni forgot early in her vice presidency that she is supposed to be vice president of the republic, and therefore of the people, not of the political opposition. As vice president, she belonged to government with a mandate to serve the public, not the private and personal interests of her politics.

In other words, she could have come on board. She did not have to marry her politics with that of the president but just cooperate for the sake of unity and harmony. She did not have to sacrifice her principles either. For the things the president did that she cannot in conscience accept, she was the vice president, for God's sake, she could very easily get to talk things over with the president in private.

She did not even have to win the president over. It would have been enough for her conscience and her principles and her political obligations to have articulated her concerns directly to the president's ear and thus show respect, if not for him then for his own mandate. But no, Leni had to do her gripings in public, especially in media. Not only was that disrespectful, it was clearly political.

And that only shows Leni, as far as her politics is concerned, has never been her own person. Sad as it is to say it but she is a puppet of those who are just using her for their own political benefit, especially at this moment when the political opposition is absolutely bankrupt of both personalities and ideas to make any viable run for national positions. The results of the 2019 elections bear this out when they got a big fat egg in the Senate race.

The political opposition has refused to learn the new lessons of the times, the most important of which is that it is no longer enough for the political opposition to just merely oppose. It has to be dynamic. It has to sell its own ideas, not just snipe at the ideas of others. Rodrigo Duterte is the primary example of this new dynamic. He never undercut anyone's ideas in 2016 but sold his own and the people believed him, even to this day.