Nuisance candidates all

THE PHILIPPINE media were having a field day last week at the expense of the usual batch of so-called “nuisance candidates” for various posts including the Senate who, every election period, declare their intention to run for office. Among the subjects of their ridicule were: someone who wanted the Philippines to apologize to Portugal for the death of Ferdinand Magellan in the Battle of Mactan; the alleged owner of the Philippines; the supposed husband of TV personality Kris Aquino; and, of course, the usual advocate of US statehood for the Philippines, who claims that he has a direct line to the US White House.

The Philippine media have been amusing their readers, viewers, and listeners for decades with tales of how outlandish are the plans of the unknowns who every election time file certificates of candidacies for posts ranging from city mayor to President. Until he died, one Pascual Racuyal, a perennial candidate for President of the Republic, was among the media’s favorite subjects, one of Racuyal’s pledges should he be elected President being to air-condition the whole of Metro Manila so as to spare residents the tropical heat to which it is subjected 10 months of every year.

It makes good copy, and it’s good for a laugh or two, but hardly helps the citizenry make intelligent decisions during elections. Despite general agreement that one shouldn’t vote for someone as spaced out as the late Racuyal was, it hasn’t prevented the election of individuals who know next to nothing about the country’s problems and how to address them; who ran for office without any sense of what they would do once elected; who, once in office, display levels of ignorance equal to inanimate objects; or who, finding themselves in the company of morons in government, imagine themselves to be above everyone else including the citizens who elected them.

Blame for this state of affairs has been primarily laid at the door of a political and electoral system in which questions of platform, programs, and even individual qualifications except for the most perfunctory hardly matter, and where what count most are family credentials and the capacity to conduct what the Comelec (Commission on Elections) usually describes as “a credible campaign.” In practice what that amounts to is whether the candidate has a campaign chest big enough to pay for advertising, election watchers, and the handouts in cash and kind much of the electorate has come to expect.

Also blamed is the electorate, among whom there are millions desperate or grasping enough to sell their votes, or who, in warlord-controlled communities, vote as ordered, the real command votes in this country not being those supposedly controlled by the churches, but by local tyrants for whom the election of allies, relatives, and friends to government posts is always of paramount interest.

The media, however, have a fair share of blame too, for, among other failures, uncritical acceptance of the assumption that the most credible candidates are the men and women from the handful of families that have ruled the country since 1946,  and that, as the Comelec claims, it’s how big a candidate’s campaign chest is that should decide whether he or she is a “credible candidate.”

No one, for example, asked Vice President Jejomar Binay’s daughter Nancy, or Presidential aunt Margarita Cojuangco, who’s running under Binay’s United Nationalist Alliance rather than her nephew’s Liberal Party coalition, what either plans to do if elected to the Senate, the following exchange being typical:

Question: Are you (Cojuangco) prepared for the campaign?

Answer: I’m always prepared.

Question: Isn’t the family questioning your running under UNA?

Answer: The family (meaning the Cojuangco-Aquino clan) is united behind my candidacy.

That last gem being the Bible truth, the distinction between so-called parties being practically non-existent, and most especially, it seems, for next year’s elections, the media have never gone beyond the assumption that the candidates from prominent families are automatically credible by virtue of their names as well as the proven capacity of the groups with which they’re affiliated to spend the money needed for a “credible campaign.”

The results are elections that since 1946 have been decided by money, and which have never really presented the public with any real choice except between personalities whose strengths usually range from the ability to deliver motherhood statements, singing and dancing, or looking pretty on stage. Thus the probability that the very same types if not the very same persons themselves will be elected each time, no matter how medieval, ignorant, or even non-existent their views of government and knowledge of what the country needs are.

In the end, practically all the candidates in this country are nuisance candidates—except that those who have been so certified officially at least had a semblance of a plan, whether it’s air-conditioning the capital or having the US annex the Philippines once they’re in office. None of the latter are likely to be elected or even allowed to run supposedly because they’re not credible candidates. However, how credible are candidates who may have the name and the means, but who have neither program nor vision of where this country’s going?