People’s Choice Is Now Everyone’s Favorite Son

Six months ago, Joseph Estrada--this nation’s soon-to-be-president--was taking heavy flak. The Roman Catholic Church questioned his morals; the business community, his brains. Just the mention of his name brought a smirk to the faces of the intelligentsia.

He was, after all, a former B-grade movie star with a legendary appetite for sex, alcohol, tobacco and predawn nightclubbing. President “Clinton has the scandals, but I have the sex,” he was quoted as saying. Asked his opinion of Viagra, he dismissed the anti-impotency drug with a wave of the hand: “I don’t need it.”

Estrada, who is as famous for his malapropisms as for his romances with leading ladies and beauty queens--he has three children out of wedlock--is said to have had his confession heard by Roman Catholic Cardinal Jaime Sin and declared: “Forgive me, Sin, I have fathered.” Apocryphal or not, this story was more ammunition for his critics, who spent six months trying to discredit Estrada and destroy his candidacy.

But Estrada, a swashbuckling college dropout beloved by the poor, was politically indestructible. The masses revered him as a deity and embraced him as one of their own.

On June 30, Estrada, 61, a landslide winner in last month’s election, begins what he calls his “last and greatest performance”--as the Philippines’ 13th president. He will be the first to deliver his inaugural address in Tagalog, rather than English, and the first to scrap the traditional inaugural ball to cut costs.

Attitudes Shift From Scorn to Praise

Though Estrada was elected largely based on a movie screen image--the Robin Hood figure who conquers evil and helps the poor--the societal soundtrack one hears most often in the Philippines these days is the pounding footsteps of former critics running to jump onto his bandwagon.

In a stunning reversal of attitudes, everyone here is praising Estrada’s choice of talented, brainy advisors, the gentlemanly way he handled himself in a campaign in which 53 people were killed in shootouts, and his folksy, unpretentious manner.

Cardinal Sin, who had portrayed Estrada as the reincarnation of the devil, says, “I have met him already, and he is humble. I will pray for him.”

The business community no longer worries that he will give away the store to the poor.

“Let’s give him a chance; he may do OK,” an academic critic said.

U.S. Ambassador Thomas C. Hubbard said he is looking forward to working with the man, who, as a Filipino senator, helped throw the U.S. military out of the Philippines.

The freewheeling Manila press detected a touch of hypocrisy in all this.

The Today newspaper editorialized: “The shamelessly excessive adulation showered on Joseph Estrada by those who had branded him a murderer, a gambler, a crook, an adulterer, . . . a know-nothing and incorrigible ignoramus, totally impervious to education and sound advice, whose days are numbered because of sclerosis of the liver as proved by an egg-plant complexion, is sickening. Now they laud him as the country’s logical leader, given the intellectually and physically daunting challenges that face it and which would fell the summa cum laude decathlete at Stanford.”

But, the truth is, a lot of people hopped on the bandwagon when Estrada began acting presidential.

He has, he promised, quit his hedonistic ways and two weeks ago gave up what he called his last vice--cold turkey: four packs of Lucky Strikes a day. He has lost weight, taken media coaching and issued a consistent set of policy statements intended to calm investor fears.

Even critics admit that Estrada--whose idol is actor-turned-President Ronald Reagan and whose passion is the Chicago Bulls--has the charisma to move crowds and the charm to woo doubters.

His Authenticity Is Found Refreshing

Many Filipinos find Estrada refreshing because he is not the creation of a public relations agency. He says what he means, owns up to what he doesn’t know and is as comfortable eating rice with his fingers at a farmers’ harvest festival as he is carving into a filet mignon at a VIP banquet table.

Though he gives priority to helping the poor and improving agriculture, promising that every Filipino will eat three times a day during his presidency, Estrada said he intends to continue the policies of his predecessor, Fidel V. Ramos.

A West Point graduate, Ramos is widely credited with bringing economic growth and political stability to Southeast Asia’s only Catholic country and its most open democracy.

Estrada is not expected to have an easy road.

Unemployment in the Philippines has hit 13%, a seven-year high. Drought-stricken farmers need help. There is a separatist guerrilla movement on the southern island of Mindanao. Taxable income is falling in the wake of Asia’s economic downturn, and the foreign debt of $45 billion forces the Philippines to shell out $6 billion a year for interest and principal, double what it spends on health, education and agriculture combined.

Joseph Marcelo Ejercito Estrada was born April 19, 1937, in Tondo, a district of Manila, the son of prosperous landowners. In the late 1950s, he defied his parents and dropped out of college to pursue a career in the Philippines’ robust film industry.

He starred in more than 80 movies--playing Rambo-tough characters who took on gangsters and drug lords in action films and smooth lovers in sex comedies.

He quickly became the country’s most lionized actor. He won the Philippines’ best-actor award five times, and several of his movies are still considered local classics.

Gloria Diaz, the 1969 Miss Universe and one of his co-stars, said of Estrada: “He was a gentleman on and off the set, making sure that his leading ladies were taken care of. He wouldn’t eat until he was sure that everybody had food. During kissing scenes, he wasn’t satisfied with just brushing his teeth; he’d rinse with mouthwash, undiluted with water. He respected his leading ladies.”

Estrada entered politics in 1967, as the elected mayor of San Juan, in metro Manila. He remained mayor for 20 years--a position his son, Jinggoy, now holds--and in 1987 was elected to the Senate.

He became Ramos’ vice president in 1992. But Ramos treated Estrada with disdain, and, during the president’s first 34 overseas trips, Ramos turned the country over to a committee during his absence rather than entrust it to Estrada.

Estrada’s nickname is Erap, which translates as “pal.” He is married to Luisa Pimentel, a doctor, by whom he has three children. During campaign rallies, he jokingly introduced her as “the only wife of Erap,” although many in the cheering crowd continued to believe that number was conservative.