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

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

Making (Non)Sense of Politics

Election Lexicon

Quickie Quiz for the Politically Insane

IN 1957, when Carlos P. Garcia, in a field of seven candidates, was elected president with merely 41.3 percent of the votes cast, the modern Philippine political system can be said to have been born. A nation doesn't always have leaders with flair and charisma who, by hard work and ruthless plotting, like Quezon, or sheer flair and an even greater charisma, like Magsaysay, dominate national life. The overwhelming majority of politicians are humdrum, devious but not outstandingly cunning people, and it is impossible for someone to always shine.

	Artwork by Arnold Beroya

Add to this the weaning away of the electorate from an era in which politicians were expected to be reserved, and to have pretensions to viewing appealing to the masses as a vulgarity not to be indulged. And furthermore add the combination of a natural shifting in tastes and expectations between the jaded and, in a sense, morally bankrupt generation of politicians active since before the war, and the young, brash generation that had actually fought in that war or grown up since. And add, further, the steady erosion of presidential power and the institutional mechanisms such as block voting that Quezon had carefully put in place, and which Magsaysay wielded by sheer force of character, and the following was the result.

Not only the first plurality president, but also a president now shorn of many of the basic levers of control his predecessors had taken for granted. Carlos P. Garcia was a president born and bred by the party machine, and yet whose partymates had eliminated block voting, a basic bulwark of party-oriented voting. A president who inherited the steady removal of local government positions within the gift of the presidency, a process that had begun in response to the domineering nature but weak political gifts of Quirino. An old-style politician at a time when Magsaysay had already further eroded the ability of old-style politicians to achieve majorities simply by commanding their surrogates to issue instructions to the voters. A man who spoke Spanish and was inaugurated in an old fashioned cutaway when the electorate far preferred the rustic barong Tagalog wearing style of the late Magsaysay and was poised to raise to the Senate Rogelio de la Rosa, whose only qualification was his being a matinee idol. A president occupying an office that voters expected him to wield with the same aplomb and colorfulness as Quezon and Magsaysay.

The problem was, Garcia was like neither of these men. What Garcia was, as he himself said, "was not stupid," and for a time he and his successors proved that they were clever enough to grasp the remaining levers of power to make it to the presidency.

The popular vision of the presidency — both among voters and among the politicians aspiring to the position —thus suffered from the larger-than-life personas of past presidents at a time when contemporary presidents could not, even if they had wanted to (and try, they did), wield the powers of the executive with the same overarching authority and effectiveness as their predecessors. The means, under the law and under the system, simply wasn't there. But the expectations on the part of voters remained the same, the ambition afflicting the politicians remained the same; the intensity of popular interest in elections remained at the same fever pitch it had been at since 1946, and even more so after the brief, meteoric rise of Magsaysay. Garcia was turned out by Macapagal for much the same reasons Quirino had lost to Magsaysay, but Macapagal proved woefully ill equipped to wield executive power. He was thrust aside in 1965 by Ferdinand E. Marcos, who saw no other way to achieve the power he craved, and the position he had no intention of relinquishing, without scrapping the system altogether.

Marcos in 1969 received 61 percent of the vote, giving him the fourth-highest percentage of votes in a national election and making him the only president to achieve a second full term. Just as Quezon had set out to change the system to make it more conducive to executive influence and control, so did Marcos set out to set the stage for something even more daring: the elimination of the system altogether. This infrastructure-minded president would view elections as something like a dam, a means to channel political control, allowing him to irrigate the fields of his cronies, leave parched the lands of those who opposed him, and present to the people the pharaoh-like image of a an irresistible and indomitable will that could change the course of nature.

The water in the vast manmade lake that was the New Society proved muddy, shallow, polluted, and foul. In 1986 the dam was breached, a more natural course of water flow restored. Corazon Aquino lost the official count but won where it counted — moral victory in the eyes of her people and the world. From the start, she had shed the reluctance of a shy widow for the increasingly confident role of a revolutionary restorer: accomplishing what her husband had set out to do, which was restore elections, bringing back water, so to speak, to a nation parched for elections.

Cory Aquino was brought to power by election, indeed, by referendum, and she used elections-as-plebiscites as her key to maintaining legitimacy.

But the stage of development — or underdevelopment — of the political system that had emerged with the election of Garcia would come back with a vengeance under Fidel Ramos, who holds the unenviable record of having the smallest plurality (28 percent) in our electoral history. His success had a baleful influence on the idea of elections as a means for legitimizing presidential governance. What was important now, under the post-Edsa scheme of things, was neither popularity, nor machinery (his opponents possessed both), but tactical supremacy: doing the most with less. It was no surprise then that after the strange rise to power of Ramos, rejected by an overwhelming number of his countrymen, but esconced in the presidency anyway because he proved less unpopular than the majority of his opponents, Joseph Estrada's election six years later would take on the characteristics of a landslide (which it was not; it wasn't even a plurality as healthy as Garcia's). Ramos and Estrada proved minority presidents occupying an office burdened with expectations institutionally impossible to fulfill. An electorate increasingly polarized, desperate, and despairing; a change in popular tastes and means of mass communications that saw Joseph Estrada as the heir of Rogelio de la Rosa.

Without Ramos's tactical cunning and long experience at handling subordinates, Estrada proved inept at maintaining himself in power. His vice president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, on the other hand, had achieved a first in post-Edsa elections: a near-majority. This armed her with the ability to invoke a mandate of her own, as putative successor to Estrada. When Estrada fled the Palace, Arroyo deftly moved in (to cut a long story short), but under circumstances so unique as to be denied the natural advantages a successor-president historically enjoyed: being the heir apparent, the keeper of the flame, the inheritor of legitimacy.

The present presidential campaign is a quest for legitimacy: legitimacy lost on the part of Estrada's anointed candidate, legitimacy never quite earned on the part of the incumbent; a quest for legitimacy by other candidates dependent neither on discredited leaders in jail nor an incumbent grievously wounded by allegations she deserves to be behind bars as well. All the candidates at the present time are fighting an electoral contest overshadowed by the maturing of a political culture born in the 1960s, made ruthless during the 1970s, and made morally bankrupt in the 1990s — and yet which collectively leaders and the led view through the rose-tinted spectacles of the struggle to restore the credibility of elections in the 1980s. We have elections, just as we have water: not as the result of a rational, well thought out plan of national action, but because of fits and starts on the part of leaders who view voting as they do water: handouts to inculcate gratitude among a mendicant populace.

The day must come when fully a third of the electorate can decide to sit home and not vote, because whatever the results of the elections, nothing fundamental is at stake. Since 1946, the stakes have always been fundamental, which is why graft and corruption have always been the fundamental national issues in those elections. For what is at stake, for so many people, is the very hope of a life in which water, quite literally, can be theirs to drink, and bathe in, and where life isn't measured in one faucet per barangay, and garbage-infested canals.

Elections are like water: essential to the parched, a source of power to those who control it or even own it. Elections are like water: possessing different meanings for different people. Elections are like water: for us, at least, in a country where each upper-class swimming pool represents a reproach to entire barangays that must line up hours for something murky and foul to drink.