EDITORIAL - In politics, it is all about numbers

The amazing thing about last Friday's mass oath-taking in Cebu of new members of the president's PDP-Laban party is not that 50,000 people turned up but that it was exactly the number the organizers estimated would do so. Whatever the organizers did to make sure the estimated number would turn up ought to be a testament to their ability to deliver.

And that is precisely what is important in politics, because the game is always about numbers. Whoever has the numbers wins. The character of those numbers is irrelevant. The age, gender, ethnicity, profession, and other qualifications of those numbers matter only to the social scientists but not to the tabulators whose only task is to count those numbers as votes when the time comes.

And so it does not matter as well whether those numbers have been bused, fed and paid. For as long as they hold true when they are needed, that is enough. This is the Philippines where party principles and platforms are important considerations behind the numbers. Here, everything is simple. Here, everything has been reduced to the lowest denominator -the sheer physical presence of a person as an eventual voter.

So again, it is all about numbers, and the one who has them has the advantage. Conversely, those who do not have the numbers become irrelevant, as pointedly underscored by Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez to describe Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña. And while Alvarez may have misappreciated Osmeña, there is no denying that his words rang true at the time he said them.

Also, those who do not have the numbers lose the right to self-importance, just like Cebu Governor Junjun Davide has. In the run-up to the mass oath taking, Davide, a Liberal, said he was open to a coalition with PDP-Laban. The way he said it made it appear he still had the numbers to make a coalition relevant, and that he was just waiting to be asked.

What a terrible misappreciation of the facts that was. Davide must come to the realization that if a coalition has to happen, it is he who must come begging for it. Not that Davide is dying for it. But if he in fact is open to a coalition as he himself put it, it is not PDP-Laban that will come knocking. He has to work out a deal at his own initiative. Or has he forgotten the country has a new president who is not a Liberal but a PDP-Laban.