Iloilo Ilonggo vs Boy Mejorada

By Pet Melliza /The Beekeeper

Politics and public opinion is one battlefield, it need not be said. The “battle for hearts and minds” is almost the key to winning the election.

We say “almost” because public opinion sometimes plays second fiddle to a politician’s effective employment of gold and guns. But barring the use of money and goons, swaying public opinion to one’s favour or black-eyeing an opponent with adverse publicity, is crucial to one’s political career.

Let’s recall election 2004 in Iloilo Province. The warring giants vying for the top position in the province were Niel D. Tupas, Sr. the incumbent governor and Rep. Oscar Garin, Sr. the challenger and who has the savvy for effective utilization of the press.

As early as December 2003 Garin fielded media practitioners to bombard the print and broadcast with two radio block times daily on the reelectionist. His machinery was well oiled and the issue it hankered on was corruption. Tupas apparently with thinner burser, was the underdog and at the receiving end of the brickbats. He had only two 30-minute radio block times, on Saturdays, one anchored by Mac Nava and the other by Manuel Mejorada.

It was only in the middle of April 2004, with the elections barely four weeks away, did Tupas put up an evening blocktime. Despite Garin numerical superiority in the media, Tupas’s propaganda machinery proved more effective. It raised one issue that decisively shattered Garin’s gubernatorial dream – the incident of yonder years when he allegedly fatally shot a fellow jeepney passenger.

No matter how loud he and his media spinners denied, listeners already firmly believed what Tupas’s spin doctors had dished out, that indeed, the challenger was “violente”. The rest is history: Tupas’s landslide victory was unprecedented.

Let’s analyze what happened. The Garin propaganda camp concentrated too heavily on Tupas’s supposed corruption issue eventually made the latter the star of the show ignoring the maxim “bad publicity is publicity still”.

Garin’s propagandists barely touched on his good traits as a person and politician. Instead of selling their principal to Ilonggo voters, his media spinners wasted time promoting the enemy. In contrast, Tupas’s spin doctors played up the good news about their ward rather than defensively answering corruption issues.

Toward the homestretch of the elections, Garin’s propaganda machine became a loose cannon targeting the wrong persons – Manuel Mejorada and Mac Nava who were just too happy to receive the blows and in the process, deflect the bombs away from Tupas.

We can see the same pattern emerging again this time in Iloilo City and involving Manuel Mejorada. The social medium FaceBook and the Wordpress blog is now being used to hit him personally, incidentally, with similar issues that the Garin camp fired at him in 2004.

The blogger using the alias “adobo ilonggo guapo” merely reiterates the issues on Mejorada’s alleged infidelity both as a husband and political spin doctor. Adobo ilonggo guapo crucifies him as womanizer and opportunist who has a history of biting the hand that fed him.

The background of the fracas is that Majorada and businessman and Iloilo Press Club president, Rommel Ynion, are at the forefront of the campaign against Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog and Rep. Jerry Treñas for the overpriced construction of the Iloilo City Hall.

The issue they raised is good governance: the city already spent P368 million but what has been delivered is but a shell of the 7-storey edifice. The “saving” of P90 million would have sufficed to finish the 14,000-square meter structure but Mabilog changed order and is poised to execute the authority granted him by the council to spend P262 million more to complete the job which thus, makes the Iloilo City Hall, no longer “our pride” that Mabilog brutes around, but the most expensive building in the country with the cost of P45,000 to P50,000 per square meter.

Ynion slapped charges against Mabilog before the Office of the Ombudsman to stop him from dragging the city into the extravaganza whose burden will be borne neither by Mabilog nor Ynion but by taxpayers themselves.

Regardless of whether adobo ilonggo guapo is bankrolled by Mabilog is none of my business. But the blog simply misses the point.

The overpriced city hall issue is too indefensible. Adobo ilonggo guapo’s tact of biting the wrong leg sidetracks the issue.*

Read more about King by iloilonewstoday.com