Unlikely role model to court youth votes

Watching the US elections is interesting, if only for its similarities to RP’s. The attendance of Hollywood stars in competing Democratic fund-raisers sparked a brouhaha last weekend. Media commentators lambasted both John Kerry and John Edwards for turning their separate $1,000-per-plate dinners into show biz extravaganzas ahead of the Oscars. Talk-radio listeners heatedly debated the value of celebrities in political campaigns.

In Manila snooty voters are shaking their heads as the big parties use entertainment stars not only in campaign rallies but in senatorial lineups as well. If the opposition KNP has the Sex Bomb Dancers to draw in the crowds with gyrating hips in short shorts, the administration K4 has the Hot Babes. In the KNP senatorial ticket at movie stars Boots Anson Roa and Jinggoy Estrada. K4 has Bong Revilla and Lito Lapid. Ihe biggest star, of course, is action king Fernando Poe Jr. as KNP presidential standard bearer.

Polls show that voters go for old familiar names and not platforms. Thus in the top five slots for 12 senators are Revilla, Lapid and Estrada. Among the 12 top choices are old pols like Juan Ponce Enrile and Kit Tatad of KNP, and Miriam Santiago of K4, all of whom the electorate trashed in the 2001 congressional election.

Same in the US, where a political scientist once wondered about the electorate’s collective wisdom in voting based solely on names. In 1958 an unknown candidate was elected state treasurer of Massachusetts because he had the same name as the candidate for the US Senate, John F. Kennedy. Thirty years later also in Massachusetts, a Robert Kennedy and an Edward Kennedy, no relation to the famous family, were elected respectively to the Governor’s Council and the Middlesex County Commission. More strikingly in Michigan in 1984, the Republican Party nominated Alfred Lawrence Patterson, whose name was similar to that of popular Oakland county prosecutor L. Brooks Patterson, as its congressional candidate. There was one problem: Patterson was a patient in the Northville Regional Psychiatric Hospital. Yet, although unable to get out and vote for himself, Patterson nevertheless defeated two party opponents for the nomination.

The Republicans and Democrats aim to get younger voters who of late have been shunning the voting precincts. Critics are asking how George W. Bush will do this with a running mate, Dick Cheney, who’s old enough to be his father.

In Manila the two main parties profess too to be reaching out to the youth, aged 18-30, who comprise 40 percent of voters. Yet they have only five relatively young senatorial bets. For K4: Mar Roxas, grandson of a former president and son of a Senate president; Pia Cayetano, daughter of an ex-senator, and Revilla, son of a retiring senator. For KNP: Amina Rasul, daughter of an ex-senator, and Estrada, son of a resigned president and a sitting senator. The latter is hardly a youth role model, being merely out on bail from the heinous crime of plunder.

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Artista na naman? All this hand-wringing about an impending FPJ victory invariably ends in muttering about the stupid masa. Supposedly intelligent voters sneer that addlebrained movie fans cannot tell reel from real life. They ask why civil servants must have at least two years of college education, but the masa will readily vote as president a man who dropped out of second year high school. Often has it been proposed that only bonafide taxpayers be allowed to vote, and thus disenfrachise unthinking voters from the slums and the farms.

Yet the masa is not stupid. They are ignorant, having been deprived of superior but expensive education, and even of iodine in their formative years due to malnutrition. There’s a big difference between being stupid and being uneducated. And it’s the old pols who keep them ignorant because their political careers thrive on it.

The blame should rightly fall on the likes of Sen. Ed Angara, author of the Free High School Law. He used to be president of the University of the Philippines, and thus should know the value of education. Yet it was he who, although proposing only in September a switch to parliamentary form because FPJ might become president, put up the high school dropout as candidate of the united opposition. Now FPJ leads in all the surveys although he confesses to know nothing about politics or how a law gets passed by Congress with whom a president must deal.

Politicians also have no permanent friends or foes, only permanent self interests. And this alientates the masa from the system from which they find no succor or relief from misery. They come to emulate the selfishness of old pols, voting only because they were bribed or promised a job. They scoff at lofty ideals the way the pols do. Common good, clean government, national direction no longer mean anything to them as with politicians.

For the masa, politicians are all alike. And they are wise in thinking so. In 1986, prodded by then-defense chief Juan Ponce Enrile, Col. Gringo Honasan demanded Ernesto Maceda’s sacking from the Aquino cabinet for corruption. Now, Maceda and Enrile are in Poe’s senatorial ticket, and Honasan is their campaigner. Four years ago Ernesto Herrera led congressmen in impeaching then-President Joseph estrada. Now he is on the same senatorial ticket with Estrada’s son Jinggoy. Only last December, Miriam Santiago was defending Poe against critics, challenging them to a debate on his abilities to serve as president. She is now in the other party. The masa will vote them because they like what they hear from them, not what will be done for the masa. After all, pols don’t do anything.

If there are stupid voters, they’re the educated ones. They clearly consist of 65 percent of the electorate, those who won’t go for FPJ, yet they can’t unite for their own good. They can’t get the many candidates to unite under one party to defeat the uneducated vote. They have not learned from the mistake of 1998, when they were disunited as well under six or seven candidates, and thus let Estrada win with 30 percent of the vote.

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