It is not at all difficult to have a solid basis for preferring BF over other top aspirants if one has seen the transformation that Marikina City has undergone throughout his 3-full term as city mayor.
If surveys were conducted on BF’s last day in office, results could have indicated an overwhelmingly satisfactory trust and performance ratings for the man at the beginning thought would be Hitler.
BF is a doer, not a talker.
In two probably funny events, BF may have measured less than the common notion of a glib. In one, BF is said to have fumbled the words ‘above’ the law and ‘abide’ by the law, when asked how he might have violated certain laws in driving off sidewalk vendors or squatters. In yet another, his idea that the State should subsidize presidential candidates did not sell albeit BF’s underlying idea is to level the playing field and to stop corruption.
It is hoped that oratorical savvy doesn’t have to be the prime criterion in governance assuming that indeed, BF fails by few points off the mark.
BF is an industrial designer.
The fast transformation of Metro Manila ought to be living testament of the works of this man who thinks of himself as an artist who puts anything in the canvass as having meaning. Thus, people begin to appreciate the emerging Metro Gwapo which BF intends to adopt into the other major cities in the country – if and only if – more people would soon find out his untapped potential to be president.
One District Engineer I talked to confessed to the extraordinary tact of BF when he was with the DPWH. Apparently, BF tells them that there is no need to go into heavy foreign borrowings if only the government has the political will to raise the level of productivity. In fact, BF expects a professional engineer to be hands-on – that the engineer himself must know how to plaster walls, how to put hollow blocks one on top of the other, et cetera.
Sometimes, if we just abandon old ways of thinking, maybe we should rather choose a president who can build the infrastructures that a country, to be productive and to develop, needs. BF’s idea of productivity requires that everyone has to do his part in nation building – an asset than a liability to the community of which he is a part.
Rightly or wrongly, BF seems hard to sell.
Soon, BF will come as ‘bestseller’ and by way of public demand, may become the popular preference in the political marketplace. Come to think of it, in the more ‘branded names’, one ends up buying the nice labels rather than the product itself. So it pays that we choose the politicians we deserve.
From my end, I have no reason to think that BF will not make good a president.
There sure is a whole task ahead of BF and how best he will be able to communicate his ideas to as many more people as possible, then the better. Truly, he has to cover more ground just as well reaching out to the common folks so they can begin to realize that BF’s VISION is a doable plan – not those grand utopias espoused ever eloquently by politicians with nothing but their gift of gab.
At times, the best way to look at governance is to look at the blueprint. It is time that the corporate affairs of our country be managed by a professional engineer wit the technical know-how and industrial savvy to make us proud of our country. If we are proud of the growth and progress we will achieve, everything else follows. Let BF begin the grand job!