"Trustworthiness and Integrity" trumps "Experience and Long Résumés" this election year

After going through 3 and a half years of the failed Edsa Dos Experiment, PEOPLE WANT CHANGE. They know this country can't afford another 6 years of massive corruption, more divisiveness, more job losses, and unchecked rampant criminality under the current president... so this year, voters are looking for somebody who they can TRUST, somebody with INTERGRITY.

Most people believe that FPJ has those qualities, that's why he is the frontrunner.

Unfortunately for Mrs. Arroyo, she is poorly lacking in those qualities.

Experience and "candidates with impressive resumes" are great usually, but these are not the key qualities most voters are looking for this year (maybe 2010?).

We already have a president with such qualities (GMA), but people are sorely disappointed with her for being a worse president than the previous one on all respects -- corruption (her administration is one of the most corrupt in recent memory), managing peace and order and improving the economy.

Most voters don't trust Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and they have good reasons not to. She squandered whatever goodwill she had over the 3 years after edsa 2. Instead of uniting the people like she promised 3 years ago, she went after her political enemies instead.

She, with her civil society friends and the Catholic Church, thought they could crush Erap and his supporters by using strong-arm tactics to humiliate erap in front of his followers. We know what happened after that -- EDSA 3.

The poor people, which comprised Estrada's core supporters, took to the streets and angrily protested against Mrs. Arroyo and "civil society". They tried to overthrow her government in order to return it to it's rightful occupant, President Estrada -- the democratically-elected president in 1998. The size of the crowd at EDSA TRES were estimated to 4 times that of Edsa Dos, but the military did an effective job of quelling the mass riots, so GMA politically survived that day.

But most believe that edsa tres only failed because it did not have military support, only edsa dos.

I'm sure GMA and her allies took that as a sign that majority of the people are still against her presidency and angry at the way erap was treated.

So she shifted her focus on Panfilo Lacson instead, another opposition member and now presidential candidate. On August 5, 2001, then Coronel Victor Corpus, in collaboration with the Philippine Daily Inquirer, launched a series of Malacanang-orchestrated accusations of narco-politics and money laundering against Lacson. With no credible evidence to speak of, Corpus was still able to convince the Senate, controlled by a majority of senators loyal to the administration, to investigate the matter.

Once the senate took responsibility for the investigation, it became a circus... a freak show event against lacson. Phony and manufactured evidences were presented, "witnesses" with questionable credibility (rosebud, ador mawanay) were paraded, at tuloy tuloy ito araw araw for many days on TV.

The Inquirer too was relentless in it's attacks against Lacson. They forgot their standards of journalism when the described evidences they knew FROM THE VERY BEGINNING were bogus, questionable and dubious... as credible and reliable. Zero-credibility witnesses like Mawanay and Rosebud were presented in a positive light without question, even though most people can see that they were lying through their teeth.

And yes, the Inquirer did admit later on that Victor Corpus wasn't credible and that he has yet to produce any credible evidence vs. Lacson.

But that one-sentence admission was buried in the inside pages of their paper. No formal or public apologies to Lacson. No Public Corrections where readers can clearly see it. NONE. NADA.

For most Inquirer readers, Lacson is still guilty of all the crimes Corpus pinned on him.