Tatad, who is bowing out of the Senate on June 30 after two consecutive six-year terms, observed that this is in marked contrast to previous Senates where men of vast experience and more advanced in years were preferred by voters.
A number of young legislators are in the new batch of senators in the incoming 12th Congress, specifically Noli de Castro, Ralph Recto and Francis Pangilinan.
Tatad remarked that this might have been the result of a change in the political taste of voters. He pointed out that a majority of the electorate are youths and he presumed that they must have wanted to elect somebody from their ranks.
He said that gone are the days when voters would prefer experienced older men to the Senate, the likes of Claro M. Recto, Lorenzo Tañada, Gil Puyat, Quintin Paredes, Arturo Tolentino, Jovito Salonga and Camilo Osias.
Tatad refused to say, however, that the election of younger men would result in a lower quality of the Senate. He contended that the voters could be wiser than many believe them to be.
In a related development, Senate President Aquilino Pimentel Jr. said that the results of the last election indicated that media have supplanted political parties.
"From now on, mass media will have to be reckoned as a more powerful force than political parties in electoral contests," he said.
He cited the phenomenal victory of senator-elect Noli de Castro as an indication of the power of media.
Pimentel noted that De Castro did not even conduct regular meetings, had few posters and did not even have poll watchers, but got a strong following because of the barrage of ABS-CBN reports extolling him.
Aside from De Castro, Pangilinan was also given a strong push by ABS-CBN. In the 1998 senatorial election, another ABS-CBN personality, Loren Legarda was also the top vote-getter. Second placer Renato "Compañero" Cayetano had a top-rated program in the same network before the 1998 senatorial election. – Efren Danao