Mabilog shrugs off ‘padding’ yarn
Iloilo City Vice-Mayor Jed Mabilog, Liberal Party candidate for mayor, yesterday shrugged off as “just another black propaganda” of his opponent, Raul Gonzalez Sr., the story that he had been padding his resume to hide his transcripts of records from public scrutiny.
Mabilog was reacting to what Gonzalez had told media in a press conference: that his transcripts of records at the University of the Philippines in the Visayas (UPV) and the West Visayas State University (WVSU) showed the “lackluster grades” of a “pasang-awa.”
“On the contrary,” Mabilog told this newspaper, “I have never projected a self-image of an outstanding student in college. Yes, I was an ordinary student. But whenever the occasion calls for it, I always tell my speech audience that I am a late bloomer. I am proud of being one. This should inspire the similarly situated youth into going for a better life outside of the academe.”
Jed Mabilog’s claim of being a “late bloomer” is not without basis even in the academe. He was in the Dean’s List when he took up his post-graduate, masteral course in Executive Fellowship Program at the Ateneo in 2006-2008.
He said he had never bragged of graduating from a complete course at Harvard University. But his short course in Organizational Performance at Harvard, he said, had helped shape him into a successful businessman and politician.
If he had failing grades at UPV and WVSU, he explained, this was because he was “pala-absent,” having spent more time for his extracurricular activities that would eventually mold him into a local political leader. In the early 1980s, he was Kabataang Barangay chairman at Tap-oc, Molo.
“While it’s true that I dropped out of Medicine Proper at WVSU in 1990,” the vice-mayor reasoned out, “it was because I had never dreamed of becoming a doctor. I had planned to be a lawyer but my father dissuaded me because there was already a lawyer in the family — my elder brother Joseph.”
Mabilog quipped, “Why does not my opponent look into the school records of a candidate for congressman, a lawyer who took the bar twice?”
Meanwhile, a barangay captain denied a report by a radio block timer that he and three other barangay chairmen had abandoned Jed to campaign for Raul Gonzalez Sr. for mayor and Raul Jr. for congressman.
When informed of the block timer’s allegation, barangay chair Rudiver Jungco of Jereos, La Paz expressed surprise, “No way. If that were true, I should have gone to the barker’s program myself to confirm the story. I see no reason why I should go back to the Gonzalez camp. Jed Mabilog is a better leader.”
The other barangay captains falsely reported of defecting to the Gonzalez camp are Larry Quindipan of San Nicolas, Peter Chong of Railway and Carlos Guarin of Aguinaldo.
On the other hand, a Mabilog coordinator accused the camp of another mayoralty candidate, Larry Jamora, of misinforming newspaper readers with the report that Mabilog, his running mate Jamjam Baronda and their Sangguniang Panglunsod candidates had quit doing caucuses and rallies because, unlike Jamora, they could not gather sufficient crowds anymore; and because Jed’s followers had defected to the Jamora bandwagon.
“There is no Jamora bandwagon. Surveys still show that Jed still leads,” the coordinator said, “The truth is that we have saturated all 180 barangays already. And so we have moved on to district gatherings. Say, we go to Molo, where people from barangays of that district come together.”
