Elections: Extract ‘Em Planks Out

With the Philippine elections just around the corner, we are bombarded with motherhood statements from candidates on a daily basis. Unfortunately, there were candidates in the past who have no idea what it meant to legislate or how to lead but were able to fake their way to public office anyway… and there are candidates now who will do the same thing.

Jobs for everybody, end to corruption, free education for all, affordable health care, we are destined for greatness, yada yada yada. Senseless “feel good” statements, iterated since time immemorial, uttered by many candidates, but unsupported by specific planks and almost always never realized.

Debates and forums should have been good occasions to compare candidates and find out what they stand for and what they are made of. Instead, they are just given yet another opportunity to blabber about their “visions.”

It is time to have a more sensible and better gauge in picking our leaders assuming that we do not know much about them in the first place.

We can start with the basics. We should determine what their planks are; you know, the core topics of their platforms or manifestos. Things are seldom black and white but we will have to opt for a binary answer to create a baseline. Here are a few questions I would ask to extract out their platform planks:

• On pork barrel: Are you for the removal of pork barrel in Congress given that the primary job of a Congressman is to legislate in the first place?
• On population control: With the poverty and population explosion problems in the Philippines, would you vote for a Reproductive Health Bill that encourages both modern and natural methods of family planning?
• On education: To produce better graduates, would you want to extend elementary and high school to 12 years just like other developed countries?
• On foreign direct investments: One reason why foreign companies would not do business in the Philippines is their inability to own land. To increase investments, would you be for 100% ownership of land by foreigners?
• On service to countrymen: Given a scenario where death is imminent and you have only one choice, would you save 100 countrymen you do not know instead of a loved one?

There would also be questions about bureaucracy, corruption, economy, environment, infrastructure, foreign policy, security, freedom of speech, human development, health care, women and children’s issues, abortion, charter change, and many more.

Obviously, a yes/no answer on the above cannot be sufficient. We must also know how they intend to support such planks, but which are easily verified by their records of accomplishment, if any. With a baseline in place, it would be more difficult for candidates to boogie around issues.

Last, I would generalize the issues into ten or so categories, give each candidate, say presidentiables, a virtual 1,500 billion pesos budget (the 2010 Phil. Budget), and ask them to apply a nice round billion amount to each category. Because you see, they can have the grandest and noblest plans and yet not have the money to accomplish those anyway; then they fall right smack into earth and reality dawns.

At this point, we should already have a fairly good idea what each candidate stand for. Are they consistent, though, or would switch and take a side that is more popular in the blink of an eye? Are they smart enough to decide by themselves or are usually just taking cues from advisers? Are they firm in their convictions or do they just want us to dance with them?

At this point, we already have plank-supported platforms, not merely motherhood statements, laid out clearly before us. We add in diligence, integrity, and a few other sometimes subjective matters that are personally important to each one of us and, my friends, we are done.

At this point, we have what we need to know and, thus, can choose, with a semblance of intelligence, the leader who will try to march us to progress and have a reasonable chance of succeeding.