Reporter’s Notebook : 2 Candidates End Campaign With a Bid to Bust Ghosts

As the presidential campaign drew to a close this week, both sides were taking cracks at elusive targets: ghosts.

In a speech last Thursday, President Ferdinand E. Marcos referred scathingly to his opponent Corazon Aquino’s still unidentified corps of advisers as “ghost presidents.”

For weeks, Aquino’s supporters have accused Marcos’ KBL party of enlisting “ghost voters” to pad the returns on election day today.

“Cory” and Marcos T-shirts abound, but so far no ghostbusters.

One of the more popular T-shirts seen on the streets so far expresses dissent but is apolitical in the Philippine context. “Beam me up, Scotty,” it says. “This planet sucks.”

Manila and other cities are papered with campaign posters. But Jejomar Binay, an attorney in the Aquino camp, says things have gotten out of hand. He said he will file charges against traffic aides and the pro-Marcos Makati Youth Development Force for what they did at a recent Aquino motorcade in Manila’s business district.

“These goons in uniform tore up opposition banners and stickers that were attached to the vehicles,” Binay said. “Worse, they also stuck Marcos stickers not only on the windshields of vehicles but also on the faces of the motorists.”

Reporters indulged in some unscientific polling by watching campaign crowds for hand signs--the KBL’s two fingers raised in a “V” and the opposition’s raised index finger and perpendicular thumb, “L” for Laban, an Aquino party.

But appearances can be deceiving. A cigarette vendor trotting alongside a press bus in Davao was wearing a Marcos T-shirt, and a reporter asked, “Why are you supporting the president?”

“Ah, this is a Marcos T-shirt,” the vendor shouted back, “but my heart belongs to Cory.”

Security for the candidates has seemed incredibly lax by American standards. At rallies, the speakers’ platform usually stood in the middle of a plaza or an athletic field jammed with tens of thousands of people. The candidates and their immediate security details often had to push their way to the stage.

Marcos and his wife, Imelda, reportedly wear bulletproof vests under their clothing, but Aquino does not. Onstage, they were in easy range of an assassin, if one could raise his arm to fire in the press of the crowd.

More than 600 foreign press people are in the Philippines to cover the elections, and many of them are staying at the government-owned Manila Hotel. For more than a month the hotel’s employees have been required to wear Marcos buttons. Even the cab drivers who service the hotel sport Marcos paraphernalia.

“It’s in the (drivers’) association regulations,” one of them said.

At a Marcos rally on the sugar-producing island of Negros, plantation workers were trucked in to Bacolod City to line the route to the rally. Peering over the sides of huge trucks normally used to transport cane to the mills, they looked like cattle on the way to market.

Several told reporters they had been paid 25 pesos to attend the rally, five pesos more than their normal daily wage when there is work.

Entertainment is a hallmark of Philippine election rallies. For the opposition, singing has been led by children of the candidates, Corazon Aquino and her running mate, Salvador Laurel. The Marcos camp used big-name stars to whip up the crowd.

An employee of a theatrical booking agency said, “It’s hard to get on with regular business with all the calls from Malacanang (the presidential palace).”

A highlight of the Marcos rallies was a song or two by the president’s wife, Imelda. Campaigning in the western Visayas, Imelda, a native of the Visayan island of Leyte, chose a regional ballad, “They Say I’m Not Worthy of Your Love.”

The opposition, facing a shrewd politician in Marcos, occasionally shows signs of near paranoia. Before he joined Aquino on a unified ticket, Laurel was announcing his own candidacy when a power failure shut down his microphone.

He charged that Marcos was trying to sabotage his press conference, and he was only half-joking.