I share Manolo’s enthusiasm. Inquirer.net’s Philippine election map offers political junkies (to borrow that familiar blurb on many a box of toys) “hours and hours of fun.”

Serious fun too: The interactive map offers visual proof of a defining quality of Philippine politics, at least as this journalist understands it. Filipinos like to vote. (Corollarily, an election boycott is almost un-Filipino.)

Consider only the most famous instances: Those in the opposition who took part in the 1984 parliamentary elections (”participation without illusion”) and in the 1986 “snap” presidential election had a better grip on what Filipino voters wanted, and thus a better claim to being the electorate’s true representatives.

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THIS being the information age, they say not only is the amount of information available at your fingertips virtually limitless, but that it’s freer and more intimate than ever before. That may be so, but it also requires something that’s no different from the manner in which information was accessed and used in the past. That is -it takes time. Time to produce, time to find, and time to digest. And yet, time is something we keep saying we don’t have much of, anymore.

YugaTech says blogging is like a virtual handshake. Taking off from where Abe Olandres begins, perhaps blogging and so forth have the potential to evolutionize politics because, as populations get bigger, it’s the only way to restore something fundamental to politics: it’s a process between the candidate and the voter, one-on-one, personal, and up close.

Since the stump-every-Plaza-in-the-country style of campaigning is well, going out of style (too many plazas, too many people, too little time, too much money and not enough bang per buck in terms of peso-per-candidate), the most effective virtual handshake before the blog and the internet was the TV ad. And yes, as visiting the helpful links provided by Julius Enerio and wanderlust shows, you can learn something about the candidates through their ads.
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Inquirer Compact’s front page today (March 29).

compact-032907.pdf

I was already out of the newsroom when the question occurred to me. Why did Jun Ducat, millionaire businessman and master attention-seeker, schedule the release of his hostages at seven in the evening? Inquirer Compact had already gone to bed, but I still called up Abel, our executive editor, to inflict my take on him. (He was kind enough to hear me out.) The release was set for 7pm because that’s when the country’s two major newscasts air. (ABS-CBN starts earlier, but by seven in the evening GMA’s is on the air too.)

Ducat wanted maximum coverage, and he got it, live, on national TV. Or perhaps we should say, Ducat and company?

ABS-CBN reports that the police is now looking at the political gimmick angle, in part because the grenades turned out to be duds. (The, ah, prescient Chavit Singson raised the possibility, when he was interviewed over GMA last night, saying for all he knew the grenades could have been real but empty.) Truly, given Ducat’s first hostage-taking a decade ago, past is prologue.

ABS-CBN also reports that, as reader Jim and I have just discussed over in the previous post’s comment thread, both Singson and Bong Revilla did not in fact follow protocol, and defied express police instructions not to enter the bus.

(Kudos to ABS-CBN for being the first to bring this story to the next level.)

If, as President Arroyo said after the hostages were released, the incident was “prank terrorism,” shouldn’t charges be filed against those who were, let us say, accomplices in the prank?

Senator Bong Revilla broke a fistful of rules, and perhaps a law or two, when he directly intervened in today’s hostage crisis. Radio and TV anchor Ted Failon pointed out one of them: Revilla, he said, caused a “delay” in the negotiations simply by entering the picture. But that did not stop Failon from asking Revilla to keep his cellphone on, while the senator “negotiated” with the main hostage-taker, Jun Ducat. As a result, the listening and viewing public managed to hear Revilla’s amateurish intervention (”Pare, mahal kita”) and then Ducat’s obviously well-rehearsed rant.

That, in the proverbial nutshell, was the dilemma that faced journalists, especially those in radio and TV, today. To follow the ground rules, or to bend them for the benefit of an exclusive or a scoop.

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AT 7:05 P.M., along with the rest of the country and maybe the world, I breathed a sigh of relief after hours of anxiety.  The kids started exiting the bus. The hostage crisis is over. The government says the incident was an embarrassment to the country. It’s certainly a stinging indictment of life in our country, in the eyes of some foreigners.

I hope John Nery blogs about what it’s like in the newsroom when situations like the hostage taking in Manila occur. Some things that went through my mind, watching the hostage drama on TV:

1. Jun Ducat was obviously a man who’d already gotten what he’d wanted with a previous hostage-taking: having gotten away with it before surely emboldened him to do it again; and furthermore, giving in to some of his demands might have emboldened him to ask for more.

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OUR government conducts surveys on poverty, of course. And when surveys emerge that it doesn’t like, it actively disputes such non-government surveys. But in the end, government goes where public opinion leads it. The President imposed a deadline on curbing hunger, designated lead agencies, mobilized funds, and along the way decided to stop trying to counter public opinion, and instead, prove itself responsive to that opinion.

Yesterday, blogger  Philippine Commentary essentially defended  the President, who has been clobbered in the media for something she said. What she said is true, he said. The blogger’s reaction reminded me of how often we debate our national characteristics, and how often we despair of what we consider our national character.

Charles de Gaulle once famously said of his fellow Frenchmen, “how can you be expected to govern a country that has 264 kinds of cheese?” The French are often described, and at times describe themselves, as impossible to govern, and impossibly quarrelsome; if you ever have a chance to read the book “Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French” (Jean-Benoit Nadeau, Julie Barlow), you would probably enjoy it. It reads in many respects, like a book about we, the Filipinos. How often have we heard something similar to what de Gaulle said? I even once heard a variation of de Gaulle’s remark: “how can you govern a country with dozens of different kinds of kakanin?” And in our exasperation, we turn to what some would call “self-flagellation.” In some cases, it comes close to either self-loathing, or a furious contempt for our countrymen.

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By Monday night, or Tuesday morning at the latest, our discussion of survey “trends” will either be instantly obsolete, or confirmed. Well, maybe not confirmed, but at least made marginally more useful. That’s when the latest SWS poll results will be released.

In the meantime, let’s resume crunching the numbers again (again, keeping the usual caveats in mind).

4. TV advertising has had a marked impact on some, but certainly not all, campaigns. Chiz Escudero is an obvious beneficiary: From a low of 19.3 in November (statistically in the same ballpark as his July rating of 20.2; if the absolute numbers mean anything, however, the slide must have been due to the early end of the second impeachment proceedings in the House), he rose to 23.2 in January and then, after the campaign period officially started (and TV started airing his ads), zoomed up to 35.5 in March.

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I took a look at the data John put together and since I’m a visual person, I tried to graph the survey results. Here they are:

I think that looking at the numbers as colorful lines helps us see, straight off the bat, the relative positions of the candidates vis-a-vis each other; the distances between each can be quite large.

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Let’s take a look at those Pulse Asia results, in the rather crude chronology I strung together. Aside from those old workhorses, name recall and heavy adspend, what other factors do we see pushing up, or pulling down, the candidates’ prospects?

1. Two of the consistent Top 3 candidates ran in the last elections: Loren Legarda for vice president, of course, and Ping Lacson for president. That simple fact must have added to their electability. Running a national campaign forces a candidate to put up a national organization; Legarda’s organizational prowess in 2004 was especially impressive. Ping’s presidential campaign was no slouch, either; it met its stated goal, of securing over 3 million votes. (This, in my view, effectively cost Fernando Poe Jr. the margin of error he needed to counter any election fraud, but that, as they say, is another story.)

But organization is not the only advantage Loren and Ping enjoy; the publicity they reaped from running strong campaigns (and of course from the post-election positions they took) has, in my view, helped them retain their impressive ratings. Ping did not do as well the first time he ran for the Senate; SWS surveys showed him at 27-28 percent in the last three months of the 2001 campaign. He eventually placed 10th. Loren, as any political junkie knows, topped the 1998 Senate elections. In the first two months of the 1998 campaign, however, as measured by SWS surveys, she was solidly in the middle ring of the winners’ circle.

One possible implication for 2007. Loren may become only the second person in our history to top the Senate elections more than once. (Jovito Salonga holds the record. He ran three times, and topped the race each time.)

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