"Such callousness should be condemned."
Under the law, campaigning for the coming elections should begin only when the official campaign period starts. That’s still months away, and so nobody should be campaigning this early.
Clever politicians, however, have found a way to circumvent the statutory ban against early campaigning. They place expensive political advertisements on television which promote their name, alleged virtues, and supposed accomplishments. So long as those advertisements do not explicitly state that the politician concerned is running for a particular public office, the advertising scheme cannot be considered as premature campaigning, the type prohibited by election laws.
The Supreme Court said so, and with frustration, because the current state of the law does not address this blatant circumvention of the statutory ban against premature campaigning, and there is nothing that the highest court in the land can do about it.
Under our constitutional system, the remedy is not with the courts, but with Congress, which must plug the loopholes in the current law.
Instead of fixing that loophole, politicians exploit the loophole by resorting to early campaigning, but without the “vote for me” part typically found in regular campaign propaganda. That’s an “in your face” insult to the electorate.
Although the text of the law creates a loophole, candidates for high public office should be decent enough to observe the spirit behind the law and to wait for the official campaign period to begin before engaging in early campaigning.
Premature campaigning not only violates the spirit of the law. It is an offense against public decency because money, and lots of it, on what is essentially an illegal election activity, is wasted on the politicians’ self-serving advertisements.
Those TV advertisements cost millions of pesos to produce, and even more millions of pesos to broadcast, particularly during prime time. How these politicians intend to recover those expenses after he is elected is a taxpayer’s nightmare.
The big TV networks will not speak out against this racket. They profit a lot from the nefarious practice.
Simply stated, many candidates have no regard for decency. This can be seen by the numerous politicians whose advertisements about themselves are proliferating on many TV channels lately.
From what I have observed, the first early campaigner is Taguig Representative and ousted House Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano, who has at least two different TV advertisements.
One advertisement showed “poor Filipinos” complaining about the P1000 financial assistance given by the government to those economically displaced by the recently instituted enhanced community quarantine. If only Cayetano had his way, the “poor Filipinos” claim, the dole would have been P10,000. The commercial ends with an image of a smiling Cayetano with his name.
Cayetano’s other commercial simply promotes himself as an ideal public servant.
This guy sure has a lot of money to spend. How does he plan to recover his expenses?
Then there is Senator Grace Poe-Llamanzares, whose commercials remind the viewers that she is the daughter of the late box office king himself, Fernando Poe, Jr. Poe accuses the government of wasting money during the pandemic, but she’s now on a spending splurge to promote herself.
Next is Senator Manny Pacquiao. His advertisements capitalize on his fame as a boxer (which has no bearing on his duties as a senator), and include a dubious claim to being a competent public official. With all the beating on the head Pacquiao got in his decades in the boxing ring, the guy is now incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction.
The advertisements of the self-admiring Manila Mayor Francisco “Isko Moreno” Domagaso underscore the hard times he went through before he joined show business and politics. He equates that to his being the champion of the poor folks of his city.
People want to know if city hall pays for Moreno’s advertisements, considering that his commercials also highlight what he considers as his accomplishments as city mayor.
The other politicians engaged in early campaigning on TV are ex-Senator and incumbent Antique Representative Loren Legarda, Secretary Mark Villar of the Department of Public Works and HIghways, Senator Juan Miguel Zubiri, and former Vice President Jejomar Binay.
Speaking of Binay, he lost big in the 2016 presidential election and lost again when he ran for the House in 2019. This politician has been unemployed since 2016. Where does he get all that money for his commercials?
Poe, Pacquiao and Domagoso are eyeing the presidency. Cayetano, Legarda, Villar, Zubiri and Binay will run for the Senate.
These traditional politicians don’t mind spending millions of pesos in their premature political campaign when many Filipinos are barely surviving the economic difficulties brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Such callousness should be condemned.
In my opinion, those eight characters are engaged in shameless early campaigning during these hard times. Voters should reject them in the elections.