Lest we forget what happened a week ago today: Rodrigo Duterte, cocky and vile as ever, was needled to exasperation by the only senator who stared down the foul-mouthed ex-president who expressed zero remorse for his drug war policy that killed thousands.
My favorite exchange between Senator Risa Hontiveros and the former president during the eight-hour Senate hearing on October 29 was when Duterte said, in explaining why he wanted drug criminals killed, that they all deserved to rot in hell. This prompted Hontiveros to taunt him that the Senate had no jurisdiction in hell. But we would all go to hell, Duterte said. The opposition senator — very mindful, very demure — shot back: I have no ambitions of going to hell.
It takes a woman — or a particular kind of woman, as I am wont to say unapologetically among peers and friends.
In a story last year after Hontiveros tussled with Vice President Sara Duterte, Rappler reporter Bonz Magsambol asked, how far will Hontiveros’ fierce dissenting voice take her? Well, it has brought her to that bizarre but remarkable day last week.
On Tuesday, November 5, would it take a woman to crush what The New Yorker has described as “an agent of chaos, an enemy of liberal democracy, and a threat to America’s moral standing in the world?” In the most polled election we’ve ever seen, we mortals are being told it’s a dead-heat race all the way to Tuesday’s presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.
What election narratives will play out? That women and the Gen Z will come out strong for Harris, or that the young will sit it out over frustrations with critical issues such as the Biden administration’s stand on the Gaza war? That Harris would lose the male vote even among immigrant communities, or that the Trump campaign’s recent gaffe over Puerto Rico would fuel a last-minute Latino turnaround for her? (Incidentally, the New York Times tells us why the Fil-Am vote in Nevada could swing election results for the presidential race in that battleground state.)
America has been down this road before, in 2016, when the populist Trump barreled through the Electoral College to defeat Hillary Clinton. What would a repeat do to the world’s most powerful nation?
America could take a lesson or two from us, because we had a headstart of a presidency that reset the political order, managed through chaos, institutionalized violence, corrupted the bureaucracy, ripped apart institutions, trashed honor and decency, and muted citizenship. It would take generations to fix — and heal from — the damage wrought by Duterte. And we were slapped with a reminder of those dark years in last Monday’s Senate hearing.
The campaign for the US presidency has been analyzed and scrutinized to death by US journalists, scholars, and activists. In the last two weeks, I felt like major US news outlets showed signs of panic with their sudden screaming headlines about the dangers of a possible Trump presidency, as if they didn’t know this before.
Things have now become a blur. I liken my own unhealthy immersion in it to taking morsels of each dish in a sumptuous buffet, leaving me satiated but undecided as to which meal actually stood out. It doesn’t help that I drove this morning listening to Vox’s Gray Area podcast, which asked historian Edward Watts the ultimate existential question: Is America collapsing like ancient Rome?
But why does this election matter to us?
- Rappler’s foreign affairs and defense reporter Bea Cupin cites three reasons why the Philippines has a stake in this race. Watch it here.
- President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has made an unequivocal pivot to the US and the West. What his government and the Biden administration have had in the last two years is a love fest, which angers China but nonetheless pleases the Marcos base and the military. There are “understandable anxieties” in Manila, wrote Bea in this View from Manila story.
- Technology, and how it shapes our political behavior and choices, is messing with our future. The Philippines was the petri dish for a disinformation playbook that reverberated in America and the rest of the world. For this election, The Nerve consultancy firm based here, studied the US information ecosystem; check its worrisome findings and recommended paths forward in this piece. See the way deceptive political ads have invaded Meta and Instagram. And how AI could influence US voters.
- What would be the impact, if at all, of the US election on Philippine labor? Rappler’s labor reporter Michelle Abad explains in this story.
You can read all about our explainers, interviews, fast facts, and analyses of the US election on this page. Come visit the US vote channel on the Rappler Communities app.
Meanwhile, sit tight! – Rappler.com
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