Is She The One? — page 3

Arroyo is conducting an altogether different kind of campaign, as tightly tailored as her pantsuits. Aides admit that the President can't pull Poe's kind of crowds without paying hoi polloi to attend. So Arroyo's whistle-stops must demonstrate the things she's delivered as President. During her swing through Laguna and Quezon provinces, she opens a bridge and buries a time capsule at the groundbreaking for a road. She dominates a rally at a local bandstand, pacing the stage with a microphone that appears giant in her tiny hand, lecturing about the importance of coconut-oil mills and aid to be secured from the Asian Development Bank. Arroyo has stage presence and uses it: a sway of the body, a Sinatra-like attention to all parts of the crowd. She repeats her "Six Promises for the Next Six Years": to create 6 million jobs, build 3,000 school buildings and 3 million homes, achieve national self-sufficiency in rice supplies, treble lending to small and medium-size enterprises, and provide health insurance and education for all.

Unlike Poe, Arroyo has no hesitation about sitting down with a journalist to describe her presidency so far and what it promises for the future. She describes "the mess that I inherited" in 2001, and says the election will be a "test of our will to move forward and finally defeat poverty." Arroyo is combative, determined and self-assured to an almost disturbing degree. During a 20-minute interview, she talks nonstop with absolutely no body language: her legs remain crossed, her hands folded in her lap. Her mouth works incessantly, but she simultaneously reads a briefing paper—seemingly absorbing its details—and yet also manages to maintain periodic, polite eye contact. She's acting presidential, if not entirely human, but she knows how to spin a difficult question: Does it hurt when even her own supporters describe her candidacy as the "lesser of two evils"? "My opponent is doing a great disservice to our poor citizens," she states. "They want answers, and he has not provided them."

The next stop is an open forum on a basketball court in the town of San Pedro. Arroyo, now spritzed with a Chanel perfume, confidently takes questions from the audience—the kind of public challenge Poe scrupulously avoids—and wraps up the meeting with a surprise. San Pedro is run by Felicisimo Vierneza, the running-for-re-election mayor who pleaded on the campaign bus for 3 million pesos for his delayed road. Arroyo has decided to give it to him. She hands Vierneza a check, to grateful applause from the crowd.

By shoveling out pork like a Spam factory, Arroyo is allowing herself to be branded as one of the old-time pols—the very class from which Poe is promising to save the Philippines. On his side, Poe's two-dimensional pitch to the masses has stripped his campaign of any meaningful debate. Which explains a thick pallor of election-time apathy and gloom hovering over much of Manila. The staff of the Prime Saloon & Bar in the capital's ramshackle Buendia district are all planning to vote for Arroyo, right down to the dishwasher. They are not bothered by the country's painful unemployment rate of 11%, a big budget deficit, the scary war on terrorists. Each of them hails from Pampanga, the President's home province, and that's the feudal loyalty that carries many a candidate in Philippine elections. Carlito Ibañez, a 30-year-old pedicab driver who plies the district, says he's voting for Poe. "I'm not sure he's the best candidate," he admits, but he is following orders from his neighborhood captain, who in turn takes his cue from the local mayor, a Poe ally. "Life is so hard," Ibañez continues. "And it won't make any difference anyway." Ronnie Pasco, a 36-year-old civil engineer enjoying a rustic bowl of beef marrow soup at an open-air dinner counter, says he's voting for Brother Eddie Villanueva, an evangelist who, with only 3% support in the opinion polls, is guaranteed to lose the presidential race. Pasco doesn't mind. "I'm sick and tired of the dumbos," he says. "I'm sick and tired of the intelligentsia. I'm sick and tired of the artistes. I want to cast my vote for someone who's not corrupt." The Philippines has gone through a lot of would-be savior-Presidents: Marcos in his heyday, Aquino in hers, Arroyo after EDSA II. Next week's election shows the Filipinos are still waiting for the real thing.

With reporting by Nelly Sindayen/Manila

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