Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. is being a father’s son when he says he’s open to the idea of running for and being president. Saying so is perhaps in the same league of his father’s claim that human rights were never violated during his iron-fisted, dictatorial rule. His father claimed he was the best and the brightest. His father was a known congenital liar and it appears the lying gene got passed on to his only son 

Yes, the surname Marcos remains popular but not because it can win national elections. No Marcos has ever been elected to a national office since the downfall of his father’s dictatorship in 1986. 

Bongbong himself failed to win in 1995 when he first ran for the Senate. Imelda Marcos, his mother and the other half of the hated conjugal dictatorship, contested the presidency in 1992 and lost miserably. We cannot even be sure if Bongbong would fare better this year, what with Satur Ocampo and Liza Maza determined to make the public remember the continuing lack of remorse on the part of the Marcos family.

The Marcoses could only win in the province of Ilocos Norte because they are a political dynasty there. Imelda had been able to win a congressional seat in Leyte but that is more because of the other dynasty she is supposedly connected to, the Romualdez political family.  In the 2010 elections, cousins from the same Marcos clan will be fighting tooth and nail for the governorship. 

The Marcos name remains popular because the political record of his, Bongbong’s, father is considered the yardstick by which all preceding presidents are measured. It used to be conventional wisdom that no president could be worse than Marcos. Now, he should thank Gloria Macapagal Arroyo because she is really gunning to dislodge the departed dictator for the titles “most hated”, “most corrupt”, “most brutal” president. 

Meanwhile, nearly 10,000 victims of the Marcos dictatorship have won a landmark human rights class action suit in the United States. The nation has yet to recover fully from years of the Marcoses’ profligacy, plunder and pillage of the treasury. That we have yet to actually recover the stolen and ill-gotten wealth and give part of them to the victims is of course an issue that haunts all post-Marcos administrations.

The biggest fault in or of Bongbong is his most brazen and unapologetic revisionism of the record of the Marcos dictatorship. He calls for national unity against poverty but would not find any accountability for what his father did or did not do for 20 years. He says the Marcos family is clean but does not mention that they still face cases here and abroad. He conveniently forgets the US courts’ guilty verdict on the Marcoses’ human rights atrocities. It is as if his father was never a dictator, was never accused and found guilty of massive human rights violations, and was  never ousted directly by the Filipino people. He seems to be banking on a serious case of national amnesia

The country was largely unimpressed when Bongbong told foreign correspondents in Manila he’s open to being president. Unimpressed because Bongbong offered nothing new. Like father, like son, all he could give Filipinos are lies.