Friday, November 07, 2008 Wenceslao: US elections and Pinoy bashing By Bong O. Wenceslao Candid Thoughts
I HAVE observed that, in talking about the conduct of every United States election, we always end up bashing our electoral process and ourselves. I actually find it repetitive and therefore monotonous, if not irritating. The latest US election won by Barack Obama, the first African-American to take the helm of that country, turned out to be no different.
I don’t think we relish flogging our own race, a form of sadism. We are just maybe too eager to point to ourselves and to our leaders our failings hoping that things, like the conduct of our elections, will change for the better. Still, there are instances when it turns grating, making ourselves look bad and affecting our self-esteem in the process.
I, too, admired the speed with which the winner in the recent US election was known. In less than 24 hours after the balloting closed, Obama was roaming a stage in Chicago delivering his victory speech. His opponent, the Republican John McCain, had by then conceded he lost, what with reports he was taking a beating in many states.
But to immediately contrast that with the Philippine experience is misleading. True, it takes eons before a winner in our election is declared (more than a month in the case of a president?). True, most of our politicians don’t accept they lose in a fair fight. But the conditions under which the US and Philippine elections are held vary greatly.
The United States is an advanced industrial country, even considered the world’s only remaining superpower. The Philippines? It is as yet a “developing” country, poor and largely agrarian. That alone speaks volumes of how comparing the manner the US holds its elections with the manner we do ours is like comparing an apple with an atis.
US elections are computerized, that country being rich and the home of Bill Gates and Microsoft. Elections there are conducted mostly in urban and sub-urban setting or in places where the population are mostly middle class or urbanites. The world’s major media firms do the coverage, so too the world’s major pollsters inhabit the place.
Contrast that with our own situation. In our most recent attempt at computerizing our polls (during this year’s Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao elections), the Commission on Elections had to load computers on the back of carabaos so these can be transported through rough roads, forested and hilly terrain to interior polling precincts.
Corruption and maneuvering by traditional politicians have, admittedly, stymied our efforts to modernize the election process, plus of course government’s genuine lack of resources. But even without these limitations, we still cannot hope to approximate the kind of elections we saw in the US a few days ago considering our economic situation.
I agree that our primitive type of electoral process can stand improvement and that there is a need to ram this reality into the minds of our corrupt, incompetent and greedy leaders. But isn’t there a way we can observe the US elections without jumping at the opportunity to wave our inadequacies like it were some tattered Philippine flag?
(khanwens@yahoo.com/ my blog: cebuano.wordpress.com)
