THE MOUNTAINEER

Kiss of death
Edison Baddal

My night monitoring of the latest update on the ranking of the winning senatorial candidates since the Media quick count was conducted hours after the May 14, 2007 elections was quite dumbfounding. I was astounded that those who occupied the Magic 12 spots during the early Media quick count were the same people in the said slots when the quick count was taken over by the NAMFREL-PPCRV.

A little later, when the Commission on Elections started its official canvass, it had the same bunch of winning candidates. The slight difference was the periodic changes in the ranking of candidates from the top two spots of the totem pole at first and those switching places from the 9th to the 12th slots at the lower end.

While those occupying the slots from the 3rd to the 8th seemed to have maintained their ranks at the inception of the quick count up to the current official counting, the critical lowest two slots were being contested by two candidates from the Genuine Opposition.

The contest was made more exciting with two TU candidates trying to dislodge them. One of the TU candidates actually managed to wrest the 12th spot at some point but pulled down after a lapse of a few hours or days. At this time, with the Comelec almost winding up its canvass, the proclamation of the 12 winning senators will take place any day from now.

Incidentally, the poll body’s plan to proclaim the winners for the nine slots during the last weekend has been temporarily put on hold due to possible changes in the rankings as over a million votes have to be canvassed yet.

From the looks of it, one can make a safe guess at this point as to who will be finally proclaimed as the next batch of senators. I, for one, bet my bottom peso that those stated earlier (8 GOs, 2 TUs and 2 Independents) having occupied the 12 slots a couple of weeks after the elections will be the final 12 senatorial winners.

What is intriguing about this is that – thanks or no thanks to the surveys – almost all those surveyed to be the probable winners before the elections were same winning ones in the latest canvass. That is except for one or two who were not given a fighting chance during those surveys. Cynics assume that a pre-election trending brought about by the surveys might have conditioned the minds of the voters prior to the actual elections which might be true.

What is worst is that cynics even conjecture that moneyed candidates might have commissioned those surveys to register themselves strongly in the consciousness of the voters early on. As to whether there is veracity to this assumption or not is another story.

Paradoxically, the blitz in political ads staged by the TU candidates was stultified by the fact that only two managed to remain in the winners’ circle in the latest canvass. Such is nothing less than astonishing. As expected and as pre-election surveys showed, the majority of the probable winners belong the GO Nevertheless, the unexpected entry of Trillanes in the putative winners’ circle, where he was not given munch chance during the surveys, struck as a fluke to many.
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The questions that begs to be asked now: What could be at the bottom of this sound thrashing of the TU senatorial candidates by the GO candidates? Did the affiliation of the TU candidates with the administration proved to be a kiss of death for them (as the president is widely believed to have cheated her way to victory in the 2004 Presidential polls)?

For the first question, many hypotheses could be posed. One, GO candidates were more credible than TU candidates. Although the GO candidates were not bereft of sordid characters (as one of them is believed to be a murderer while another is considered an adulteress), such negative portrayals were obviously eclipsed by the more favorable impressions people have for them.

Naturally, having more credibility, people have more trust and confidence in them. As such, they evince an aura of integrity in contrast to the image of the TU candidates which is something less than favorable.