OPINION and OPTION 

By ELINANDO B. CINCO

            ‘Tis a season of high-falutin issues, ludicrous proposals, and belly-aching entertainment numbers coming in a packaged form from candidates who are wooing a dazzled populace of 61 million voters.

            The aspirants, beaming with ardor and zeal, openly mesmerize their audiences with plans and proposals that can only compare in heights to the soaring rockets blasting from a NASA station.

            Or, the electoral hopefuls talk easily of offering solutions to the problems of the land that have remained untangled by a number of earlier administrations.

            In particular, the 63 senatorial aspirants are of special breed. They do not have just aces under their cuffs but a bagful of them brimming with convenient solutions to easy problems, if you ask them.

            And without a doubt, they have mastered their own jargon.

            Many of them easily get carried away by cloning such huge government programs like the “Build, Build, Build” in their project proposals, forgetting that their main task when elected is lawmaking, not public works building.

            For example, while campaigning in Region 8, in an attempt to impress the six-province voters in Eastern Visayas, a senatorial hopeful told a rally in a booming voice, “I will build similar San Juanico bridges to four island municipalities fronting Samar and Leyte.” Whew!

            While an administration senatorial bet remarked in a live TV coverage that he was obviously fed up by his partymates’ reciting favorable government programs: “I don’t think the voters only want to hear issues. They also want us to recount to them our own personal capabilities to become senators.” He must have a colorful life!

            Speaking before a huge crowd in a highly urbanized Northern Mindanao city, a prospective lawmaker told a rousing crowd: “This administration has already improved the lives and well-being of Mindanaoans. Prepare yourselves to go to Luzon. It has now become the Mindanao of old.”

And the least of those samplers was a curt but pointed repartee by a 60-year-old candidate for mayor of a Visayan City. Peeved by a persistent criticism against him by his rivals that he was unfit to become “a Hizzoner” because of his lack of education, he answered matter-of-factly: “Hindi,ah!.Umabot din naman ako ng Grade Six.!”

            On the whole, the candidates, while going through with the task of untying all sorts of puzzlers,  talk as if they have not known that DAP and PDAP have been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

            And then realizing their bags of proposals are hitting rock bottom, the aspirants turn to cinematic fare: Singing, never mind if their voice is what in Spanish is described as desafinado. Or, spreading their stage presence with unsynchronized choreography.

            But to the crowd in the provinces who have gathered in public plazas, cross-roads near public markets, and in covered basketball courts, the deformed terpsichorean show was good enough.

            What about the votes of the entertained electorates?

            Well, maybe the candidates can count them on in the next election.