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Volume 14,
Number 20 |
Also in this
section: The first televised Panama City mayoral debate Notes
on an early round
by Eric Jackson Editor’s note: Miguel Antonio Bernal is my man for mayor, in case you had any doubt. That disqualifies me as an “objective journalist” in many eyes, but then so many of my “completely objective” colleagues have their favorites too, but consider it “professional” not only not to admit this, but to actively conceal it so as to be perceived as totally even-handed. I think that the more honest thing to do is to admit one’s biases so that people can take that into account, and to be fair with people with whom one disagrees. I hope to be that in the column that follows, but I realize that if I’m the only one writing about this important local race much will be lacking. Thus I invite all of the mayoral candidates and their supporters to send in their columns and letters between now and the May elections, so that all points of view will get a full and fair hearing. This was a debate at the Universidad Latina, coordinated by a citizen’s group that had never done such a thing before and by MEDCOM, a PRD-aligned media corporation. Quite frankly, it wasn’t that well run. Most of the questions were too general and the candidates only occasionally expounded their specific differences. There was one of these call in / email in “polls” and by that measure Miguel Antonio Bernal ran away with the debate, with 48 percent saying he won as opposed to 24 percent for Bosco Vallarino and 23 percent for Bobby Velásquez and negligible figures for Iván Blasser and Miguel Batista. That result proves very little. Maybe it shows that Bernal’s supporters were more enthusiastic or better organized for the straw poll, but viewer response is a scientifically skewing method that rules out any good random poll. There have been other polls of a better quality, which showed Velásquez and Vallarino out front and the others substantially behind, but those were affected by primary contests that got those two candidates’ names and faces and organizations on the streets and thus overstated their support as against the others. In any case, I suspect that this debate was the start of a filtering process. Miguel Batista gave a passionate presentation, but not a particularly impressive one. Especially because the Vanguardia Moral de la Patria party whose ticket he represents is doing so badly it’s hard to imagine that Batista will move anywhere in the polls, except possibly out. One of the points to which Batista repeatedly returned was to encourage the planting of trees on every available space --- a bad idea if not done in a well-considered, scientific and systematic fashion. Plant the wrong tree too close to a sidewalk or sewer or utility line and its growth will cause problems. Some trees thrive in shade and others need full sun. Some trees, like those two unfortunate ficuses in the traffic island with El Cangrejo’s Einstein head statue, obstruct the view of important public landmarks and create driving hazards to boot. Along some streets the planting of one species of tree alone can have a stunningly beautiful effect, but a monoculture in a neighborhood, let alone a city, is an invitation to deforestation by blight. Yes, Panama City needs reforestation, including the re-establishment of some mangrove forests along parts of the waterfront and other species in and around our parks that provide habitat and food for wildlife. But it needs to be a very deliberate process, undertaken in coordination with experts with specific goals in mind. Bosco Vallarino, like Batista, hammered away at the PRD and its candidate. In particular, Vallarino blasted a recycling contract that the city has made with a Spanish company, alleging that it’s going to make people pay for garbage pick-up. He may be right about the latter point, but he didn’t really demonstrate that in the debate. One gets the sense that his main reason for opposing the contract is that it was made by the current PRD city administration. But we do need recycling, and there are both legal and practical impediments to the breaking of municipal contracts every time the administration changes. It’s unfortunate that both in this debate and in Panamanian public discourse generally candidates talking about the trash issue don’t address the matter of its generation in the first place. There are many jurisdictions in different parts of the world that require deposits on beverage bottles and cans, that require payment for bags used at stores, that restrict the amounts and types of packaging for consumer products, that encourage industrial and construction methods that produce fewer and more benign waste products. This is a matter for national legislation more than municipal action --- which in this country could easily be justified as a public health measure to reduce mosquito breeding --- but it’s also one of those things that Panama City’s mayor would be in a good position to urge upon the national government. (Now that our major breweries and soft drink bottlers have been sold to foreigners, it actually ought to be politically easier to pass some of these reforms than it would have been a decade ago.) At the end of the debate Vallarino began to talk about God’s law, apparently joining his alliance’s presidential candidate Juan Carlos Varela’s play to a religious right that may or may not be out there in substantial numbers. Vallarino also touched on his work as an underground broadcaster in Noriega times, and I would suspect that as the campaign goes on this and his participation as a member of the invading US force in 1989 will attract closer scrutiny. Iván Blasser came across as a “calm” alternative to the PRD and said many of the right things. But it’s hard to be totally credible attacking special interests when one is the candidate of the two most thoroughly rabiblanco-led political parties. His evasion of the “yes or no” question about whether he supports the Cinta Costera --- “it’s not a priority” --- surely isn’t going to help him with the middle and upper class property owners whom the Torrijos administration wants to pay a special assessment to finance the project. One can be too calm. The middle of the road is where one runs the risk of being hit by cars going each way and Blasser needs to get out of it if he’s going to go anywhere. But although noncommittal he came across as reasonably well informed and not insane, so let’s not discount Blasser’s chances just yet. Everyone else on the stage was gunning for the PRD and Bobby Velásquez is the candidate of an increasingly unpopular incumbent party. On the Cinta Costera and a host of other issues, he found himself defending his party’s performances on the municipal and national levels. The big exception was that he put a bit of distance between himself and the most abusive urban developments, and considering that former Housing Minister Balbina Herrera was in large part responsible for many of these decisions and that she supported his opponent in the primary, he sounded credible enough on this. But his idea about creating a special office for citizen participation? Sounds like another bureaucratic non-response to popular alienation. Why this isn’t just another example of the PRD’s opaque and military-affected style of top-down leadership, much akin to President Torrijos’s notorious “dialogues,” is something he’ll have to more convincingly demonstrate. Bernal? I suppose that with his history he didn’t need to say harsh things about the PRD, and he did emphasize his independence in such a way that it contrasted well enough with Velásquez as well as Vallarino. But should he have been meaner? I think that we will see in the next credible polls whether Bernal broke away from Blasser and Batista to make this a three-way race at this stage of the game. I hope he did. With more than six months to go before Election Day, there’s a long road yet to travel in this campaign. How long? For one thing, not all of the candidates have running mates and if the bochinche turns out to be true Velásquez and Vallarino are both going to be hurt more than helped by the running mates that their respective alliances foist upon them. There are also several months in which the parties whose hopefuls aren’t doing well can negotiate alliances and abandon certain candidacies.
Also in this
section:
Make
the Executive Hotel your headquarters in Panama City --- http://ww.executivehotel-panama.com
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©
2008 by Eric Jackson email: editor@thepanamanews.com or phone: (507) 6-632-6343 Mailing
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