Arroyo’s campaign handlers say she has what it takes to win: the money, the machine, and the experience.

	The President hopes the Bush visit bolstered her legitimacy and also her candidacy. [Photo courtesy of Malacañang]

RONALDO PUNO is looking cocksure these days. That is because he is confident that in Showdown 2004, his candidate, the incumbent President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, is the one to beat.

“I see the President getting 10 to 12 million votes,” he says. “I doubt if the others can come close to that level. She is in a better position to reach the target because of superior resources, superior organization, etc. The others will be struggling all throughout the elections.”

Puno is an organization man. To him running a campaign is a science: He rattles off statistics, talks about databases, adds up the cost of campaign logistics. The calculations come straight off the top of his head. The more he looks at the numbers, the more convinced he is that it’s GMA in 2004.

To begin with, she has the personal organization. Like other campaign strategists, Puno downplays the importance of a political party. The one that campaigns and delivers the vote is the candidate’s own network of contacts throughout the country. Puno has got this all worked out. His campaign staff has built a network at the provincial, town, and barangay levels.

They have contacts, he says, in all the country’s 42,000 barangays—either the barangay captain or a key member of the village council. “You have to physically approach and talk to 42,000 individuals, maintain relations with them, keep them interested in the election, and get them to commit that their people will encircle your candidate’s name during the elections,” says Puno. “Not only that, you have to make sure they will actually do it, and after doing it, talk to other people and then watch the counting.”

The rule, he says, is that the closer to the polling precinct your contact is, the better to ensure the vote will be delivered. Congressmen are useless. They will fight for their own election first and even junk a presidential candidate if he or she is unpopular. It’s the local network that’s important. A campaign organization also needs to be in constant touch with that network: Puno stands out among the other campaign strategists because he puts a premium on what he calls “data management” and communication.

“You need the names of the 42,000 barangay captains and their councilmen, that’s eight per barangay,” he says. “You need the telephone numbers of 1,565 mayors, of all 200 plus congressmen. I have cell phone numbers in every town. I can call any town now and find out what’s happening there. We have the names of all these people. All the others never bothered to go to the Comelec and get the list and enter the data. I have all the names in a databank.”

Blame part of this mania for data on Puno’s past as a businessman dealing with computers. Even though he believes that a candidate’s media projection and the way he or she comes across to voters are the most important ingredients of a successful campaign, these have to be translated into votes by a savvy organization. In 1998, he says, Joseph Estrada was not only very popular, but also had a personal machine to capture and deliver the vote.

“At that time, we had surveys, assessments of how local officials stood on the election, every mayor, every municipal councilman, every barangay councilman” Puno recounts. “We would rank them as strongly against or strongly for our candidate. We had a file of 400,000 people, which we were updating twice a month until one month before the elections, when we were updating ever week. So we had a good count of how many barangay captains were with us, how many councilmen. These were assessments by our people in the field.”

For sure, Puno can boast of a winning streak — he ran the campaign organization of both Estrada in 1998 and of Fidel V. Ramos in 1992. Before that, he was in Washington, D.C., working as a campaign consultant for the lobbying firm, Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, which has strong links to the Republican Party. During the Marcos period, he was an official of the Ministry of Interior and Local Government.

Puno’s Formula for Success

1. Positive name recall

2. Personal organization

3. Media

4. Money

5. Data management

When he ran the Ramos campaign in 1992, Puno used his old ministry contacts to cobble together a campaign organization for the initially handicapped Ramos. It was during that time that he was branded—erroneously, he asserts—as the architect of the supposedly sinister Sulo Hotel Operations, believed to be Ramos’s dirty tricks department headquartered at the Quezon City hotel.

Puno scoffs at this allegation. He delivers, he says, because he has the science, not the dirty tricks. Certainly, none of the other strategists is as obsessed with data and with organization as he is. But he is not oblivious to the wider arena in which the elections next year are being fought.

“In 1998, the thesis of the election from the beginning was the class divide,” he says. “It was Erap para sa mahirap (Erap for the poor). In other words, it’s not important if you are a scoundrel, (so long as) you are our champion. This has ramifications in the elections now. You’re seeing a higher level of class consciousness. And then because of Erap’s impeachment, there’s a higher sense also of civic accountability.”

This is likely the reason why Arroyo is addressing these same issues—giving out land titles to the poor with one hand and conducting lifestyle checks on corrupt bureaucrats with the other. Puno concedes that in the accountability arena, Roco has the lead, if only because “GMA and Lacson have been so much in the limelight, so the demand for their accountability is greater.” So far, however, none of the contenders can mobilize on the issue of class like Estrada did.

The difference between Arroyo’s two declared rivals, Puno adds, is this: “Roco does not have an organization and he’s weak in implementation, so you deal with him on the level of ideas. Lacson has no claim to any idea but he has terrific organization, resources, and knowhow. He has the directories, the databanks.”

As Puno figures it, “Roco begins with the four million votes he had in 1998–essentially the Bicol vote, the youth, and urban voters. If he still has that, plus another million, his starting point is five million. He has to build another five million from his organization to match GMA. I doubt he can get that.”

Lacson has the organization but not the voter base of Roco, says Puno. The former PNP chief also doesn’t have positive name recall. “Ping has negative recall, GMA is neutral—some people hate her, others swear by her.” So even if Lacson has the machine, by Puno’s calculations, his negative image will weigh him down.