Lessons we can learn from the US elections

My heartfelt congratulations to Mr. Hans Hauri for being one of the seven nominees for the Asia CEO Award 2012 in the category of “Expatriates”. The Asia-CEO awards presented by American Express represents the grandest alliance of local and international business people created to promote the Philippines on the world stage. It is the biggest event of this kind in the Asia-Pacific Region. This was presented to Hans Hauri last night at the Newport Performing Arts Theater in Resorts World, Manila.

What can I say, but indeed, Hans Hauri is a unique individual who has helped not only the Marco Polo Plaza Hotel maintain its 5-Star rating, but he has also helped Cebu’s tourism organization when he accepted to be the President of the Hotel, Resorts and Restaurant Association of Cebu (HRRAC) which late got him involved as director in the Tourism Congress. Kudos to you Hans!

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Just like what I did four-years ago, I went to SM North Wing upon the invitation of the US Embassy that sponsored US Election Watch 2012 in order to show to Filipinos how their democracy works. As usual, we had “mock” elections whereby one can actually vote via an iPad, which I did. But since I wasn’t given a sticker that I voted… it was a bit tempting for me to vote again. But then that would have been a futile exercise. But what we saw in the recently concluded US elections was that democracy despite its shortcomings was still the best way to change or keep your political leaders.

As US Deputy Chief of Mission Brian L. Goldbeck told us, “This is a process that some nations still have to adopt.” Indeed, many Middle Eastern nations have never learned to embrace democracy. To its credit, the nation of Israel that is hated by its Arab neighbors have been a working democracy since Ben Gurion in 1948 all the way to Benjamin Netanyahu today, while its neighbors have yet to come up with a democratic way of changing its leadership. For eons many of these nations were led by tribal leaders… hence we cannot expect their leaders today to become democratic.

Meanwhile US Pres. Barack Obama took 303 electoral votes against Mitt Romney’s 206 electoral votes. Deputy Chief of Mission Brian Goldbeck tried to explain to the media why the US electoral system still used the Electoral College when the popular vote was already sufficient. But then, this is how American democracy works. From my understanding, the US Electoral College is their way of balancing out those states with fewer populations versus the states with a huge number of people. Once every ten years a national census takes place so that the votes are redistributed to among states based on their population growth.

At this point, I laud Gov. Mitt Romney for conceding defeat even if the counting has not yet been completed. This is what we call political maturity, which many of our political leaders seriously lack. But one huge lesson that we Filipinos can learn from the US elections is… debate is crucial during the campaign. But above all, it is imperative for the Philippines to bring back the more stable two-party political system because we have become a party of personality politics, which has not helped developed political maturity for our political leaders.

It is for this reason why 25-years after the EDSA Revolt, while we got rid of the Marcos Dictatorship that would have wanted to reign forever and ever, politics in this country is now ruled by the political elite via their political dynasties. Many of these dynasties were in power long before Marcos became a dictator and thanks to their being a political butterfly, these politicos are able to shift allegiances ever so quickly in order to keep their power. Just look at the people behind Pres. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, III today, many of them were followers of former Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. This is how ugly our political system has become with no end in sight.

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I don’t know what’s happening in the CITOM front, but there was a front page photograph that came out of SunStar daily last Tuesday showing a man on a motorcycle having five passengers… two adults and two little children and an infant. This photograph was taken in the Transcentral Highway and that photograph speaks a thousand words… as the motorcycle driver was violating a host of traffic laws, ranging from overloading, which means he is endangering the lives of his passengers to their non-wearing of a helmet.

What’s distressing here is that, anyone with a camera can simply stand along the road in Busay and take a similar photograph because that is a scenario of everyday life up in the mountains of Cebu. This only tells you that there are no CITOM enforcers assigned in that part of Cebu City, tasked to enforce our traffic rules.

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