I am writing this before the first question is tossed and before the first below-the-belt blow is parried in the first presidential debates in Cagayan de Oro.
I am glad that none of the applicants for the P400,000-a-month job did not back out, dissuaded perhaps by the thought that an empty stool would represent them if they don’t show up.
But I am lowering my expectations insofar as what this presidential candidate-got-talent will teach me on what these contestants have to offer.
The culprit is the format itself, which can only accommodate answers compressed in 60 seconds. Free-flowing discussion it is not but a referred round-robin quiz where the clock is king.
For the life of me, I can’t image how someone can pack 250 words, that is if the candidate spews out words with Mach 1 speed, into a 90-second spiel a cogent position on a complicated topic like “development” which is one of the five topics of the debate.
Another topic is “peace and order.” How can even one begin to distill the hundreds of things to be done to combat crime into a blurb no longer than a TV shampoo commercial?
If there’s something the debate would show then it would perhaps be the candidate’s ability to think on his or her feet and pray that the audience would extrapolate the bite-size reply as representative of a larger wisdom.
Call it a stress test of some sort in which hidden weaknesses would surface.
Anyway, this is my prediction: The debate will be won by, who else but by the best debaters.
Experts in elocution will win this one. For no matter how good a platform is if it is poorly articulated then the author will not be able to score points with an audience more easily swooned by spin than substance.
A candidate who had built a reputation chasing after criminals can be outtalked by a newbie who has never even been inside a police precinct.
There will be promises galore in agriculture by those who can’t even distinguish an abaca plant from a banana tree or a nipa frond from a coconut.
I can only hope that the audience won’t use the debate as the single yardstick in choosing who to vote for. An informed choice, I believe, should come from multiple sources and just not out of Twitter-long statements.
Let us not grade them solely on this recitation alone. There is no correlation between oratory prowess and managerial skills. There are other ways of weighing them like track record, campaign literature, policy statements and many more.
If you were able to watch yesterday’s debate, you can discern if an answer was polished through rote memorization or something that was honed through years of hands-on work on that subject.
This brings me to a related topic on how to boost candidate interaction with voters during rallies.
Textbook rallies follow the routine in use since the age of telegram of candidates speaking before a crowd already fired up by entertainers and paid barkers.
Candidates recycle the spiels which had drawn laughs, shrieks and claps a hundred rallies before. Expect for the salutations, like greeting the audience in the vernacular, the message remains the same throughout.
Rallies are designed for the candidates to be seen and not heard so that’s why the allotted time to speak does not go beyond five minutes.
I’ve been told that candidates spend less time on the microphone and more on running the gauntlet of selfie seekers because photos are shareable while no one has blasted an audio clip of a candidate to his FB friends.
So here’s my proposal: Why can’t presidential candidates insert a question-and-answer forum during their rallies?
By this, I mean interacting authentically with the people and not fielding planted questions by pre-briefed partisans.
Instead of preaching before a bused-in crowd who will already vote for them, why can’t they hold real town hall-type meetings where citizens are given the opportunity to ask questions?
If candidates are job applicants and the people the employers who would hire them, then this unfiltered Q-and-A will serve as some sort of a job interview.
A candidate nowadays is a product who has gone extensive makeover, from hair style to speech.
An army of wordsmiths, cheat sheet writers, PR men trail them. Every move they make are choreographed in advance.
We need our candidates unplugged. And this can be done out in the hustings when face the people on their own, untethered from their support group.