Meaningless

The on-going senatorial campaign promises not to be an opportunity to raise the quality of our civic discourse. In which case, this will not be a remarkable moment in our political history.

The quality of political debate fell a few more notches the past few days with squabbling over who had oversized posters and where they had put it up. And then there is that fabulous incident involving senatorial candidate Chavit Singson who held a raffle during one "Pulong Sulong" — which became an occasion for actually handing out money under the glare of the media spotlight.

It is not unthinkable that this political debate might end up with spats over who has proprietary rights over what campaign colors.

The pro-administration candidates, understandably, have an interest in keeping this election season as bland as possible. The less polarizing this exercise becomes, the more unexciting its outcomes, the better for keeping the status quo intact.

Their mission is to spread the gospel: convince the people that the present set of policies and the quality of management delivered by the administration will bring a better life for all Filipinos. In pursuit of this mission, reflected in the campaign tactic of convening town hall meetings, they might as well imagine the opposition does not exist. By engaging the motley opposition, they might end up assisting a group that has little means to deliver to a broad audience whatever little messages they might have.

In which case, the burden of making this debate a bit more interesting falls on the shoulders of the self-appointed opposition nexus.

But here there is a certain dissonance between delivery of the issues and the way the campaigns are organized.

To begin with, the campaigns of most of the senatorial candidates are run by advertising outfits — which is a trend that has significantly deepened in this campaign season. These advertising outfits are experts at selling shampoo and instant noodles to a mass market — and they use tried and tested means to sell candidates the same way they sell laundry soap.

Which has led to a distinct superfluity in the political ads we see.

While ad agencies are every good at selling products, they are not sufficiently equipped for issue-generation, policy debate and the gravely serious business of fostering the evolution of constituencies around the nuclei of hard political demands. In a word, seeding the quality of public debate is not their particular competence — nor their immediate interest. Plain name-recall is.

Nor are the candidates equipped or inclined to make the debate publicly edifying. Their immediate goal is to get elected — which means they should sell as fast as instant noodles.

This is, after all, a 90-day campaign period. All that can be done in so short time is to build name-recall.

In the nature of our senatorial elections, all that matters is wide name-recall and the ability to evoke trust and sympathy in a multimedia environment. Appeal to emotion has proven to be the best means to grab our voters’ attention. Charm and humor, not knitted-brow dissection of obscure policy questions, are the best means to sell candidates.

Elections-at-large for seats in the Senate, as a matter of design, militates against constituency-building, consensus on policy options and party evolution. To say we need to educate our voters during a senatorial campaign is really pointless. What we need to do is to educate our voters on the need to reengineer our process of representation in order to make elections opportunities for enriching our civic culture.

Short of that, we will just have to reconcile with an electoral contest reduced to the level of the burlesque.

To be fair, some in the opposition nexus did intend to make this campaign a "referendum" on the administration. There was an obvious strategic motivation for this: polarizing the public, building a strong partisan center for contesting the vastly more important 2010 elections and eroding the base of support the ruling coalition currently enjoys.

But this nexus neither had the organizational capacity nor the competent speakers bureau required to pull off this strategy. Whatever limited campaign resources they have at the moment are sucked into the name-recall game.

There is a cruel electoral financing dynamic that militates against the effort to build a strong issue-based propaganda offensive. Without an effective political party organization capable of raising funds for the collective campaign of its senatorial slate, the individual candidates are forced to rely on their own means to raise the logistics. Those who rate well in the early surveys get the financing support. Those who don’t get nothing.

This is natural selection at its most ruthless.

Whatever resources they have on hand, the candidates need to gamble in the early phases of the campaign to figure in the initial voter preference surveys. Those who figure well in the win column go on with stronger campaigns in the latter phases, reinforced with contributions from those betting on candidates on the basis of the electoral version of "bankability."

Conversely, those who fail the name recall test early in the running fall by the wayside. Their war chests are depleted. Their predicament compounded.

The dictates of campaigning in an era of resource-scarcity ensure that the debate between the two contending gangs will be as meaningless as possible.