Apalling

The electoral campaign last election was, pardon my word, prostituted. There never had been an election where campaign organizations were more heavily funded than in the last one. Truthfully, I was appalled by the unbelievable expense that I saw to be flowing from a purported social arms of a politician (who ran for senator) in the days leading to the May 13, political exercise. It is not my intention to sound disillusioned. If I use the word “appalling,” it is, in fact, the kindest ironical way to describe my feeling of disgust on what I saw. With the kind of monetary expense defrayed to run the campaign organization, I could not help but conclude that our political system, should it follow that candidate’s example, is doomed. By the way, that candidate is among the top three senators who got the most number of votes.

The idealist in me suggests that while financial capability is among the different factors in running a successful electoral campaign, it is not the measure of the salutary intention of a candidate. True, to succeed in an election contest, the candidate must have the wherewithal to finance his campaign. Without funding, his capability to inform the electors his vision of governance is bound to fail. It gets bogged down. But when his expense seems to breach reasonable parameters, we begin to search what for is the outlay. Parenthetically, where a candidate’s campaign is funded by manifest over abundance, we can surmise that business more than good public service is the direction.

What have I observed? The presumptive senator had, at least, two different campaign armies with apparently inexhaustible funding. I like to label them as “H” and “M”. One is purportedly designed to attain order, the assumed English equivalent of the Visayan word starting with letter “H”. While the other army was conceptualized to project the image that the then candidate would commiserate (whatever it meant) with his countrymen.

 I learned that here in Cebu City, those armies had different warm bodies composing the teams. The kind of organizations had no precedent in past elections. What was immediately visible was that there were personnel assigned to many, not all, barangays, as early as third quarter last year. Numbers ballooned because there were barangays with more than one such leader. They were not volunteer campaigners. As if working in a corporate structure, each manpower was given an allowance of seven hundred fifty pesos a week. Every one of them was supposed to enlist people to occupy lower levels. So, I saw many persons flocking to the campaign organizations of that presumptive senator for the “fund” (forgive me for the intended pun) of it. In joining the armies, they did not discuss political philosophy nor did they assimilate any program of government. All they asked was “pilay ako”.

If you reckon the operation of these campaign armies in many parts of the country and run your calculators, you will come up with such mind boggling figures as to conclude that they were financial investments to be recovered soon with appreciable ROI. Now, will you still ask me why I use “appalling”?