Rizalito David speaks up

RIZALITO David, the vice presidential candidate of the Democratic Party of the Philippines (DPP), owned up to what he said in his closing statement during the Commission on Elections-sponsored Vice Presidential Debates, which was broadcast live on free television on March 20.

What exactly did he say? For the benefit of our readers who have not yet watched the VP Debates, David stated: “Pero, at the end of the day, hindi kami mananalo. Wala ni isa dito ang mananalo kay Sara Duterte. Wala ni isa doon sa mga presidential candidates ang tatalo kay Bongbong Marcos. (However, at the end of the day, we will not win. No one among us here will win against Sara Duterte. No one among the presidential candidates will defeat Bongbong Marcos.)”

Those words elicited negative reactions, not only from David’s fellow vice presidential aspirants and the voting public, but also, and most especially, from his party mates at the DPP.

There were those who were quick to allege that David was paid by somebody, or maybe a group, to accept defeat this early at the expense of the other candidates for president and vice president.

Of course, there were casualties in that premeditated closing statement of his. The first casualty is David himself. He received undeserved flak and condemnation. In fact, he immediately went into isolation after that fateful Sunday at an undisclosed place. He denied being paid and sternly rebuked those who said so by stating, “Please stop this nonsense. I have nothing to hide.”

The second casualty is his party, the DPP, and its standard-bearer, Dr. Joey Montemayor, Jr. In my telephone conversation with David, he admitted that he was ostracized by the DPP and told that he was “sabotaging” the campaign of Montemayor. The latter did not even want to talk to him anymore.

Nevertheless, I will verify this with Montemayor on Friday, March 25. (I am writing this piece on Thursday, March 24.) The tandem of Montemayor-David confirmed their attendance in my weekly media forum, “Diretsahang Pananaw,” a week ago. However, David begged off yesterday, so Montemayor will be the only one attending this Friday. Unfortunately, whatever Montemayor would say in the media forum would not see print in this column as it would be past my deadline.

The latest casualty, in my opinion, is Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson. It was announced today (Thursday, March 24) that he had resigned from the Partido Reporma Party (PRP), as a member and as its chairman. This was an offshoot of PRP President Pantaleon Alvarez’s announcement that their party slate in Davao del Norte had decided to endorse another presidential candidate — VP Leni Robredo. Alvarez probably felt that David’s statement was a clarion call.

Anyway, I offer to David a comforting phrase from James E. Faust, an American religious leader, lawyer and politician:

“In this life, we have to make many choices. Some are very important choices. Some are not. Many of our choices are between good and evil. The choices we make, however, determine to a large extent our happiness or our unhappiness, because we have to live with the consequences of our choices.”

Hopefully, this would all end up like the biblical story of David slaying Goliath.

Back to the surveys

This all goes back to the surveys. David claimed that he would not have that defeatist attitude if the Montemayor-David tandem was getting at least 10 percent share in the pre-election surveys. According to him, Montemayor was getting less than 1 percent in those surveys. Well, it seemed that David believed in the surveys.

Anyway, there was one person, going only by the name “Cv,” who sent a message to this column via Viber. That person was asking for the source of the statistics that I used in my previous columns regarding election surveys. When queried as to why the request, the person responded that he/she was merely fact-checking.

Wow, this is something new. There are a lot of ways to do factchecking like a real pro. These methods do not include “ask the author.” When you fact-check, you do the source-tracing yourself, and that’s the primary rule because authors are not obliged to divulge their sources. If you are too lazy to do the fact-checking yourself, then let an automated fact-checker (e.g., ClaimReview, Squash) do the job for you. Probably, this “Cv” is from Pulse Asia.

At any rate, base data cited in my writings came from either the Comelec or Open Data Philippines. Other figures were derived or computed using the gathered base data.

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