“It really is the system, stupid”
THE mid-February survey of SWS commissioned by the Stratbase Group gives us a queer revelation: 70 percent of Filipino voters favor candidates who are anti-corruption advocates.
Dindo Manhit of Stratbase chimes in and says “corruption deepens poverty,” something every right-thinking Filipino knows too well.
Amen to that.
But here is the big disconnect.
A re-electionist senator who was for years charged with accepting bribes from the “queen of pork without projects” is almost sure of winning, the surveys showed. He was exonerated by the Sandiganbayan, and the burden of guilt was placed on his chief of staff, who later died in prison.
In what was a strange decision where the court directed the senator to return to the treasury P124.5 million, supposedly the amount earned from Janet Napoles’ pork barrel caper. No record of such reimbursement of the criminal proceeds by the re-electionist exists.
In 2019, the guy ran for election after getting a reprieve from detention at Camp Crame, lagged in the early surveys, but in the final stretch danced the “bu-dots” in a TVC, and won!
He is a certified member of the “Comite de Silencio” in the Senate, yet after claiming in tarps and infomercials that he authored so many laws which benefit the poor (principal or co-author?), he is reaping it big in the poll surveys. Na-goyo na naman ang botante.
He is one of three Cavitenos in the Alyansa ticket. In a very disproportionate slate, there is no Muslim, no Ilonggo, no Bicolano, and no genuine Cebuano candidate in their ticket. Most others are really from Metro Manila. But they all share a qualification sine qua non: high survey metrics.
You get to wonder — if indeed our voters dislike corruption and the corrupt, how come they keep electing the kind of leaders we have?
The answer is simple. There is no vetting process by real political parties. Surveys have become the sole determinant of inclusion in a senatorial slate.
In 1967, the first time I cast a vote, we had a two-party system. In the Nacionalista Party convention where eight candidates were fielded, they tried to have each major ethno-linguistic part of the country represented.
So did the Liberal Party. Both had a process where grain was winnowed from chaff. Convention delegates from all over the country chose the candidates.
The most contested in the NP was the candidate who would represent Southern Tagalog. Lorenzo Sumulong of Rizal and Salvador H. Laurel of Batangas vied for the slot with Laurel eventually chosen by party delegates representing the entire nation.
Sumulong did not switch to the Liberal Party, and took his convention defeat with grace. He ran again in 1969 under the same party and won this time.
In those mid-term elections where Marcos Sr. was the president, the eight winning senators were Ilocano Tarlac’s Jose Roy, Kapampangan Tarlac’s Ninoy Aquino (Liberal),
Magnolia Antonino, who replaced her husband Gaudencio who died in a helicopter crash a few days before the Nov. 14 elections, Southern Tagalog’s Doy Laurel, Cagayan Valley’s Leonardo Perez, Mindanao’s Emmanuel Pelaez, Bisaya Herminio Teves, and Cavite-Laguna’s Helena Benitez.
Compare the qualifications of those eight with many of the leading senatorial candidates now, and weep.
Moral of the story: voters don’t care about credentials, neither character nor integrity. Of course if they are asked such a “stupid” question about corruption in surveys, they would say they hate corruption, yet they keep electing the corrupt.
“Manhid na,” the Tagalogs would say. “Bisag unsahon, parehas man gihapon,” the Bisaya would chime in.
It really is the system, stupid.
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You would think that in selecting a Cabinet official, some form of vetting would be done beforehand. It seems however that in the palace, no background check is done anymore.
Someone recommends somebody to replace another, and that’s it.
This is what we can deduce from the revelations about possible conflict of interest where the newly-minted PCO secretary is at the center.
He can quibble about not being an incorporator of a firm which recently bagged a contract from a hardly kept alive government-owned broadcast station, and say he just acted as its sales representative, but if real vetting was done, that should have stuck out.
Remember the case of former tourism head Wanda Tulfo-Teo who gave a broadcast contract to her siblings Erwin and Ben, both now running for senator in the newest family dynasty with the “mostest”?
But then again, did the palace vet a Cabinet official who the Commission on Appointments discovered to be a closet American with the funny name of Erich Sylvester?
We never learn.