President Mar Roxas? It may not matter...

With still over two years before the next presidential elections, Philippine pundits are already obsessing about the potential candidates, although some commentators argue that the landscape will have changed radically by then, either with a dictatorship or a parliamentary system dominated by the same elite.
Last night I had a chance to view an interview with one of the most articulate and ‘wonkish’ of the 2010 contenders, by one of the (if not the) sharpest talk show hosts on Philippine tv.
Because there are no ideologically defined political parties in the Philippines, voters usually look for personalities that have the most of their desiderata in a leader. Let me qualify this a bit. The Left is usually assumed by the so-called intellectual elite to offer a distinct alternative, but the Philippine Left, almost two decades after the end of the Cold War, is still finding its bearings. Its political participation is limited and its parties and their programs suffer from the same superstition centering on the battle between Good and Evil as their bourgeois counterparts are.
Ricky Carandang and his colleague Manolo Quezon have of late rightly brought the issues of poverty and inequality into focus in their work and it was to be expected that Carandang would confront Roxas on these issues. Roxas would be categorized as a compassionate conservative in the US and a left-winger here. But because I am far to the left of the Democrats, I would still consider him just as an over-cautious liberal. Roxas’s program on equality is to allocate (actually reallocate) funds to education and health. He will not impose new taxes. I would, especially more punitive ‘sin’ taxes on cigarets and alcohol ( I am a former heavy smoker and still a tippler) and impose efficiency-enhancing environmental taxes ( fuel prices in the Philippines are too low, especially from the standpoint of environmentalists) and lessen income taxes on the middle class.
But it is possible that Roxas will be the best in the field in 2010. And that is only because the Left, advocating a shorter path to poverty eradication and greater equality, doesn’t really have a significant constituency. Why not? I don’t really know but I will attempt to answer this later.
How much of a difference can Mar Roxas make? Not much, as the evidence marshalled by Steven Levitt shows. But it can, if you read it, especially the links in the comments, more carefully.