Voting for a Phantom

07 April 2010

There is no doubt that Manny Villar’s dropping figures are direct results of the massive negative propaganda against him coming from practically all contending parties. His campaign has obviously suffered a severe setback by accusations that he lied about his poor childhood background. Charges of corruption related to the C5 controversy apparently failed to work owing to the people’s cynical regard for politicians as a whole. But contriving a childhood of poverty in order to get sympathy from the poor – C,D, & E – segment of society must have galled the people’s sensibilities. In the latest Pulse Asia poll, Aquino got 49% of ABC respondents while Villar got only 17%, a whooping 32-point lead. Even in the E Class, Aquino got 34% and Villar, 28%. Whether the accusations are true or not is irrelevant at this point in the electoral season. The truth will certainly come out but long after the votes will have been counted and the results irreversibly decided.

I don’t think the Villar camp will have time to overcome and recover in time for the election day. In other words Villar has already lost the propaganda war. Something else and more have to be done to rescue his campaign. And that can be accomplished only on the ground where people need to be convinced that indeed he is their hope for a better life. But time has run out for this. His campaign cannot any more make the needed shift of gears. Without a dramatic change in his campaign, it looks like the presidency has effectively slipped away from his grasp.

The failure of Villar’s campaign reveals the limits of the conventional strategies and tactics of electoral politics in the modern era. An election is won or lost depending on the success of image-building and capturing the people’s imagination through a saturation of the channels of mass media. Without doubt, Villar’s image of a poor boy that made it big through sheer hard work and perseverance resonated in the hearts of the ordinary folks. Aquno’s image of being the keeper of his parent’s legacy apparently wore out quickly in the course of the campaign. Perhaps, it even backfired in that his mother’s presidency failed to fulfill the promises of EDSA. But the Aquino campaign did a remarkable and timely intervention that quickly reversed the momentum – attacking to undermine the credibility of Villar’s “poor boy” propaganda line.

It’s the image, rather political issues that actually matters in winning votes. The people who withdrew their support from Villar didn’t have a chance to appreciate his economic platform that was forged through his alliance with Makabayan party – land reform, national industrialization, human rights, poverty alleviation and social services and foreign relations. Villar’s hundreds of millions could have been spent spreading the specific content of his economic programs that matter much to the poor and ordinary masses of people. Fired with his vision of economic development, the poor and ordinary could have been his very campaigners, thus multiplying the effects of his propaganda campaign.

Campaign posters and TV ads only serve to project an image that is so evanescent and vulnerable to negative propaganda. Electoral campaign as a game of image-building does not really give the people a chance to vote wisely and responsibly. They are presented with a phantom rather than the real issues. It’s a pity that Villar’s camp failed to recognize the superiority of a propaganda campaign that directly addresses the basic problems underlying the country’s poverty and underdevelopment. He had had his chance when he sat down with Satur Ocampo and Liza Masa to agree on a common platform. But his camp failed to give this platform a chance to reach out to the broad masses of people.

A different platform requires the employment of new strategies and tactics. Since a pro-people platform promises to benefit the broad masses, the campaign to get the biggest number of votes should have involved the participation of the masses themselves. Perhaps, Villar is surrounded with people who didn’t believe in his pro-people platform. Maybe, they think that this was but part of a gimmick to get progressive groups and individuals to his side. If that were true, it brings out this lesson: a candidate cannot ride on two horses, or as the saying goes, one cannot cross a river riding on two boats.