THE CAMPAIGN

First-World Techniques, Third-World Setting

The X-Men: The Story of Activists-Turned-Political Consultants

With a Little Help from (U.S.) Friends

Campaigning, Filipino Style

Spinning the News

Campaigns on the High-Tech Road

Songs in the Key of Politics

PHOTO ESSAY

The Presidency as Image

ELECTION PERSPECTIVES

Elections are like Water

Between Tinsel and Trapo

The Enigma of the Popular Will

VOTER'S VOICE

First-time Voter

Regular Voter

Non-Voter

Hope and Elections in Payatas

THE LIGHTER SIDE

Election Lexicon

Quickie Quiz for the Politically Insane

THE LIGHTER SIDE

Making (Non)Sense of Politics

Election Lexicon

Quickie Quiz for the Politically Insane

MAYBE Philippine politics is like a school for special children. Raul Roco is the special ed teacher. The special kids are GMA, FPJ, Ping, and Eddie, who used to have a twin, Eddie.

GMA is the class president and wants to be class president forever. Ping is the class bully who is forever staging a fight with FPJ, the prom king, while Eddie prays forever and ever. Amen.

Roco, said to be the most cerebral of the candidates (he plans to make the balagtasan a national program), is also the most temperamental (he has been made an honorary woman). As former education secretary, he behaved like a school principal and cleaned up the department of corruption. This resulted in cheaper textbooks and desks, which made a lot of corrupt officials poor, and Roco unpopular. He raised teachers' salaries, but he also introduced a new curriculum that focused on reading, writing, arithmetic, science, and patriotism. This required more work from the teachers who demanded more pay. He scolded the teachers and told them their priority is teaching. This didn't sit well with a lot of teachers and in a few months, Roco was out.

No, wait: Philippine elections is like a mental asylum. Eddie Gil, who was released just recently, was the patient who thought he was a higher investment banker, who said he's the son of Ferdinand Marcos, no — just a relative of Marcos, scratch that — he's now just a friend of Marcos, but really, he's Elvis, which explains the big hair.

Eddie Gil was considered a bother, a nuisance candidate, which makes you wonder, what the hell was the Commission on Elections thinking before it finally got knocked on the head and woke up?

Bother (sic) Eddie is cult leader of Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa. He is said to have enticed members — pyramid style — with promises of cash, free education, housing, hospitalization, and maternity and retirement benefits. He claims to be the country's biggest foundation with 13.6 million members, and second biggest in the world. He ran for senator in 1999 and lost, with votes numbering at the bottom of the heap.

The existence of Bother Eddie had upset Brother Eddie Villanueva, founder of Jesus is Lord Church, with a membership of about seven million, the biggest born-again Christian group in the country, and, some say, in the world. Brother Eddie said the Filipinos might miss writing the "R" in Brother Eddie and this would stray into Bother Eddie's votes. In the name of divine justice and correct spelling, Brother Eddie made motions to have Bother Eddie disqualified. He must have prayed, too, and now his prayers have been answered.

There are other patients in the mental asylum: GMA suffers from short-term memory loss, FPJ is narcissistic, Ping is passive-aggressive, while Roco sees the world through rose-colored Hawaiian shirts.

But really: Philippine politics is like the movie "The Passion of Christ," and Brother Eddie Villanueva is Mel Gibson, director of the movie.

Mel said he survived a near-suicidal period in his life by meditating on Jesus' suffering, which is why the former star of "Mad Max" made his latest movie so bloody gory.

Brother Eddie said one morning he was stuck in rush hour traffic and saw a family of five under the Balintawak Bridge in Quezon City. The father, a vendor, sold sticks of cigarettes to cars, jeepneys, and buses roaring by. The mother was beside him, breast-feeding a baby, who couldn't be more than a year old. Nearby were two other children, ages three and four, munching their breakfast of biscuits, most likely tossed over by well-meaning passersby.

Suddenly, Brother Eddie had a vision: The three street urchins — thin, dirty and dressed in rags — are the products of corruption and are the future of the country.

At that moment he realized this, too, must pass. I mean, change. This is why he's running for president.

From a leftist, Marx-quoting student leader who did not believe in the existence of a higher being, Brother Eddie transformed himself into a moralist, Bible-quoting church leader. Now he wants to reinvent himself and become president of the Philippines.