Shorts

Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano has suddenly erupted into the national scene, after several months of hibernation from the Villarroyo campaign. And always a punster, he comes up with an acronym, “topak”, so strained, as in pilit na pilit. But that’s Alan Peter’s special talent. I should know. I used to have a good lunch each Thursday with him, until I realized that our definition of the limits of political compromise differed, and exceedingly so.

He has been busy in the Taguig-Pateros scene, because his wife Lani is running an uphill fight, or so I heard, for the mayoralty post that Freddie Tinga is vacating. After just one term as congresswoman, inheriting the post from Alan Peter who was elected senator in the spate of his “crusade” against the now ailing Mike Arroyo’s unproven Hypovereinbank accounts, Alan’s wife is gunning for the premier post in southern Manila’s extremely rich suburb. And to “inherit” her post as congresswoman, Alan has fielded his own brother, Ren-Ren, who used to be a councilor in neighboring Muntinglupa. I heard Ren-Ren’s fight is even more uphill than Lani’s. Alan Peter’s wife won in 2007 because they were solidly opposition, and Taguig residents overlooked the fact that she was from Bicol and Bulacan. They rallied around her because she was the wife of Pateros native and balut-certifiable Alan. And in fairness, Lani is a good organizer.

Of course, Pia the sister is assured of re-election as senator. Which means at the very least, we will still have two Cayetanos in the Senate, until 2013. But it does not seem all that good in Taguig City, or in the Taguig-Pateros congressional district for the Cayetano brood. That does not bode too well for Alan Peter’s fondest dream, which is to be president in 2016. And because Adel Tamano is not going to make it as senator, notwithstanding Hayden Kho, then an Alan-Adel tandem for 2016, flying the orange banner of the Nacionalista Party, is not written in the stars.

Money Villarroyo has called in his cavalry, because his infantry, Gilbert and Adel, are no match to what Ping Lacson used to call, the “askal” ferocity of Alan Peter.

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My son-in-law thought Money Villarroyo’s new ad, featuring the “reversible scroll” where a woman reads a lament, followed by Villarroyo’s positive spin of the same lamentations, was “great”. When we were on the road for the Holy Week holidays, he asked if I had seen it on TV, and I hadn’t. Two days later, the internet was inundated with mail describing how the reversible scroll, which won a Cannes award for political advertising in 2006, was “plagiarized” by Villar’s “creative artists” from the ad of presidential candidate Ricardo Lopez Murphy in Argentina.

“Peke talaga”, the Erap camp chimed in, describing the Villarroyo ad as a “cheap rip-off of the original”. But the punchline, which is where Erap is the unbeatable communications expert, is this: “Infringed ads produce replicated results…Senator Villar will come in third in the May 10 elections, a fate similar to Lopez Murphy”. Ouch!

Now this is certainly the “creative artists” original sin. If Villarroyo could not fault them for the ad where he ascribed his brother Danny’s unfortunate death to their family’s inability to pay, because that yarn must have come only from the candidate himself, this “scroll” plagiarism is certainly theirs. Surely the candidate was never informed that it was a poor case of “gaya-gaya”. Because likely, Villarroyo would have asked, “nanalo ba si Lopez Murphy sa Argentina?”

My friend Greg Macabenta, who coined the monicker Villaroyo (I only added one more “r” to make it more succinct, and the name “Money” to emphasize the obvious), wrote recently in Businessworld “There’s an axiom in advertising that says, a great campaign can expose a bad product faster -- because it persuades people to try the product sooner and to find out how bad it is. It looks like this axiom is being proven true in the case of would-be-president- of-the-poor Manny Villar.”

But Greg, whom I first met during the late seventies, when we were both serving pro-bono in the Asian Institute for the Development of Advertising (AIDA), gives Money unsolicited advice: “Fire his creative brain trust. In fact, burn them on a stake for not allowing facts to get in the way of their fiction.”
“The trouble with that is, Villar can’t be sure that the replacement will be better. In fact, at this stage of the campaign, all the creative brains-for-hire in Manila are already busy on the campaigns of other candidates”, the marketing professional, “Make-a-Benta” declared.

* * *

Another Manny---Pangilinan though, gets the heat for another case of plagiarism, this time in a commencement speech he delivers at good, old Arrneow. Clearly the fault of his speechwriter(s), Manny or MVP bravely owns up to the error, not passing the buck, unlike the other Manny, este, Money pala, who blames “black propaganda” for his travails. And he follows his act of contrition with real penance, his resignation from the Ateneo University’s eminent Board of Trustees. Now that’s a class act.

Manny P took the rap for what was clearly the work of speechwriters who took advantage of his hectic schedule to be able to check out the provenance of simple but beautiful prose. MVP, who belongs to an older generation, is likely not a fan of J.K.Rowling, nor Oprah for that matter. Or, his literary preference is now limited to Friedman and Ohmae. But since it was he who pronounced the words which the speechwriters could have simply attributed to their sources, he had the guts to accept full blame, and forthwith resigned from the Ateneo, even if he has endowed the university with so much more than someone who claims to love his “poor” roots in Tondo, but has not parted with even a peso of his pork barrel, or a slice off his budgetary insertions, to help remove the blight from Manila’s warren for the poor.

Manny VP is not as rich as Money BV, but he certainly is a far better person, and the provenance of the comparatively small personal wealth he has, as against that of his neighbour in the country’s ritziest condominium towers, The Pacific Plaza upon The Fort, can be likely be explained by his income tax payments and his net worth statements more clearly than MBV’s curiously indecipherable SALN can ever hope to accomplish.


(banayo_at@yahoo.com)

LITO BANAYO
MALAYA Column for Friday, 09 April 2010