Yes, a BBM-Daughterte tandem could win in 2022

Lawyer Josephus Jimenez, a fellow columnist in this paper, wrote last Monday that presidential daughter Sara Duterte Carpio will eventually run for vice president as the running mate of Bongbong Marcos. While I did not see that happening initially, I am now inclined to believe that is how things will turn out to be.

The other half of the Jimenez projection is that this tandem will win because too many "good" candidates will fragment the vote and allow the "bad" to escape with victory. I do not subscribe to this characterization, but let us leave it at that. I submit though that BBM-Daughterte does enjoy the edge of owning bailiwicks --Solid North, Eastern Visayas, and parts of Mindanao. The others can only scramble for the rest of the vote spread nationwide.

The "divide and rule" strategy clearly applies here, but only unwittingly. The number of candidates is a product of the desire of the candidates themselves to run, not the result of some subtle manipulation. My wife thinks the exception might be Isko Moreno. She thinks Yorme was dropped deliberately onto the laps of Manny Pacquiao, Panfilo Lacson, and Leni Robredo to ensure divide and rule works.

Of course we will never know the final makeup of the race to Malacañang until after everybody shall have filed their certificates of candidacy. But based on the body language of all those mentioned, I think the makeup is more or less it. Nevertheless, the wife insists it is just too sudden for Isko to go real bigtime unless his move was choreographed by some unseen hand with an eye at divide and rule.

But back to BBM-Daughterte. I do not think bailiwicks and divide and rule are the only ones at play in making the tandem win, or at least do very well in the polls. I think the tandem will be riding on the crest of an unleashed sentiment suppressed for decades in a long-silent majority that has had enough of hearing only one side of a story that has divided this nation for too long.

We have seen that in the torrent of support actress and vlogger Toni Gonzaga got in the aftermath of her being unfairly criticized for interviewing BBM on her YouTube channel. Never has hypocrisy, bias, and plain intolerance been so blatantly and shamelessly pushed by a tiny but vociferous group of people upon a whole nation than in those hateful, cruel, and unfair criticisms.

I have lived through martial law and I can assert these facts with a clear conscience: I did not suffer from martial law and shame on those who would force me to say otherwise. Yes, some bad things happened to some people. But they did not happen to the vast majority of us who were apolitical and minded our own business. Just because we did not suffer does not make us callous, insensitive, or worse, collaborators.

Only the communists, the political enemies of Macos, and the gullible trapped between them, had something bad happen to them. That bad things happened at all to anybody is not a proud moment in our history. But forcing this version of history to supplant the real story does not rectify anything. It does not assuage any pain. It makes those who force their story down the throats of the rest of the nation no better than Marcos.

Marcos unwittingly made heroes and martyrs of those who rose against him, deserved or not. But forcing a narrative most people did not live through or experience makes them no less victims as well, leaving them hollow, seem like liars and eventual pariahs in their own homeland. This angers them, forcing them to ride the pendulum the other way. They will be the tide that could bring back BBM to Malacañang, with Daughterte not far behind.