Ready to rumble

A SLEW of controversial commercials in recent days is an unmistakable indicator that the country’s favorite sport has started in earnest. We mean election politics, of course. In particular that of the presidential kind.

At least four promotional videos have started to make the rounds, highlighting the voter-friendly features of Vice President Jejomar Binay, a declared candidate for the presidency in 2016, and those of three politicians publicly considering a run for higher national office: former presidential candidate Panfilo Lacson, Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano, and Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte.

In Duterte’s case, the “leaked” video—just an old one from a previous campaign for mayor, Duterte told the Inquirer—may be said to be part of a high-profile campaign to consider not running for president. But while the controversial but popular mayor continues to confess ambivalence, at best, about the prospect of being President Aquino’s successor, his video gives the game away. The 30-second video readily available on YouTube includes a data point only available last month (the fact that an international website had named Davao City the ninth safest in the world) and concludes on a line that does not make sense in a mayoral election: that the entire Philippines can be like Davao City if only Duterte’s brand of “tapang at malasakit” (fearlessness and compassion) were applied nationwide.

The promotional videos acknowledge both the power of the moving image (especially when shown on national television) and the now indispensable role of online social networks. Lacson’s, for instance, is a political advertisement being tested on Facebook; the video is actually quite clever, using the onomatopoeic sound of Lacson’s nickname (Ping) to run through a checklist of leadership virtues (Ping!). Whether it will work on TV, or indeed whether Lacson will find enough financial capital to support a second, expensive run for Malacañang that will need to be waged in large part through TV ads, may be determined by how well it does on Facebook.

Binay’s ads, befitting the former Makati City mayor’s frontrunner status, is running on the country’s biggest TV networks—a sure sign that Binay has a frontrunner’s kind of financial backing. (One of his spokespersons said the people bankrolling the ads were just “friends and supporters.”) The political commercials have been carefully designed: They represent both a continuation of the advertising strategy that helped lift Binay to the vice presidency in 2010 and his daughter Nancy to the Senate in 2013 (linking “ganda ng buhay” or quality of life with the Binay family name) as well as a recalibration of the original message—“gaganda ang buhay” (life will be better) has changed into “may ginhawa ang buhay” (life is better), an appropriate tagline for someone who has already been in national office for five years.

Should these political commercials run at all? No law prohibits prospective candidates from promoting themselves; they do not fall under the regulatory power of the Commission on Elections until and unless they file certificates of candidacy (the deadline is still five months away). Candidates are free to test the political waters, or to use the network effects of Facebook and the proven reach of nationwide TV to build their image and their case. This state of affairs favors the moneyed and the already popular; to be scrupulously fair, however, early campaigning does not always work, and many politicians and their financiers have lost serious money investing in pre-filing advertising.

But it is early campaigning. However we slice them, whichever way we choose to look at political commercials that do not literally urge voters to cast their ballot for someone, these ads are election-related in nature. They are meant to test a candidacy, publicize a candidate, narrow the so-called conversion gap between awareness of a politician and the resolve to vote for that politician. As current law stands, they are all legal but they are also ethically challenged. “The letter of the law, they’re not violating. But how about the spirit of the law?” This question from new Comelec Chair Andres Bautista is an invitation to voters to join the fight, as referees making the right call.