Send in the Clowns

One senatorial candidate is now being advertised as “gulay ng buhay (vegetable of life)” so “itanim natin siya sa Senado (let’s plant him in the Senate).” This and other political commercials now mix it up with commercials for shampoo, ladies’ napkin, facial oil and lotion, detergents, coffee, liquor, diapers, and other products.

Obviously, the political commercials seek to target the millions of TV viewers who may finally write on their ballots that name on May 14, which they can recall from the repetitive commercial bombardments. And people may just write on their ballots that name that they remember from corny, if not non-sense, political advertisements.

The political commercials don’t necessarily talk about platforms or advocacies. Some commercials just play on the candidates’ names and how they rhyme with senado, for example. With repetition as the strategy, the commercials might work for many voters who don’t really know the capacity and qualities of many candidates. Let’s just hope voters during the election won’t write on their ballots the brand of an underwear or facial oil.

In their commercials, candidates also appear nice, approachable, concerned and sincere. They project themselves as selfless servants with only country and people as their top priority. But that’s alright even if we know that the candidates’ projection is just a put-on since many other commercial products and services are advertised that way anyway.

So we are now in an age when candidates are being marketed like any other commercial product. And viewers may yet judge how much wealth a candidate has by the frequency of his or her commercials. This creates a problem.

Pity the genuinely capable and worthy, but poor candidate who cannot pay for a TV commercial. So again, it’s only those who can afford who continue to lord it over our political landscape.

Apparently, candidates now are pinning their hopes on their TV exposure via commercials after popular TV and movie personalities and basketball stars wormed their way into politics. After a noontime TV show personality first won a seat in the Senate some years ago, for example, Butch Abad of Batanes, who was being endorsed then to run for the Senate, said he should first join a TV show before launching a career in the Senate. He said this when there was only one TV personality in the Senate. Now the Senate is more showbiz-bound than ever.

So now we have what one Manila newspaper described as a political circus. In a circus, the clowns take us for a ride and we are amused while the clowns are (well) clowning around. While the clowns are clowning around, we laugh together with them as we forget that they are making a fool out of us.