Today our slate was completed. Mario Ongkiko at age 76 decided to join the ticket. He agreed with Ang Kapatiran founder Nandy Pacheco that since the problems our country face today where cooked during their time, it was only right for the elderly to take an active role in helping solve the mess. Tomorrow is the first day of the campaign.

So it's O Para Sa Bayan! (Ongkiko-Paredes-Sison-Bautista). This early, some people are already branding us "unwinnable" but this is precisely the attitude we seek to reform because only the people ultimately decide who the "unwinnable" candidates are. These many cynical political operators and pundits don't have any power. The people do. It is not that I have so much confidence that I am rolling up my pants and entering this mud pool. It is because I have confidence in the Filipino people that they will finally awaken and cast their enlightened votes. We have underestimated them for too long.

First full day as a declared candidate but unable to campaign because the start of the campaign period is still 2 days from now. I emailed my classmates and friends and asked for their prayers and support. I called a couple of printing presses and inquired about the production of election materials. I spoke to advertising executives and I spoke to party staffers. Usually, in a national campaign, the candidates are only told where to go and what audience to expect. This early, I am having to do everything by myself. I am accustomed to hardship and this does not bother me. I am starting small and inauspicious: there is nowhere to go but higher. What got me to pause was when my 6 year old daughter, calling long distance told me she threw a coin in the fountain this afternoon and she wished that I would be home in Bacolod tomorrow.

This morning, my brother drove me to the Commission on Elections Office and I filed my certificate of candidacy for the Philippine Senate under the banner of the Ang Kapatiran Party (Alliance for the Common Good) with my running mates Jess Paredes and Adrian Sison. It felt as if a boulder was lifted off my chest.

Ang Kapatiran is a different party in that principles and platform come before candidates. The Party has clear and specific objectives that enhances the common good. It promotes the politics of virtue, public accountability and duty. I agree with the priorities of the Party: moral principles over political expediency; needs of the poor over the interests of the rich and powerful; common good over special interests; life and peace over death and violence.

I cannot help but grudgingly admire all these professional politicians because the decision to join the race was the most difficult one I have yet made. In my own case, the decision was so much tougher because of my young children and my almost-perfect life at the moment. In the end, I chose to declare, after I accepted the reality that I was going to do this for myself, as my way of sanctifying my selfish life.

Again and again I have stated that the odds are particularly long and I ask for your prayers because in so many ways this mission will require a miracle. Not to get elected, that would be a secondary gain, but to enlighten as many of my countrymen that all is not lost if only we realize that we the ordinary citizens hold the real power to change our nation.

Martin D Bautista
martinb@ptsi.net

Somewhere in this blog is a quote from Teddy Roosevelt about the special qualities needed for a person to slug it out in the political arena. I have a lot of admiration for all these politicos who seem to thrive in all the patronage, corruption, deceit, immoral compromises that characterizes our political environment. I have been unable to sleep well over the past 3 weeks just thinking about what I may just plunge into. I don't think I ever pondered anything as serious as this in my 18 year medical practice. Pondering is too easy, agonizing would be more appropriate. There have been many times when I would just tell myself that it was not yet the right time and my daughters were still too young and my golf handicap needed to go down a little bit more...I have even asked my wife on a number of occasions to command me to drop everything (which she of course never did because she thinks that I will only be miserable in thinking about the what ifs). This is one part of the journey that I need to do on my own because she will have to care for our kids in Bacolod, a very radical departure from our close, daily association in our 17 years of medical practice.

The odds are soooooooooo long and there have been times when I have felt bereft thinking about the political heavyweights arrayed in front of me. They have so much more money and resources, so many more connections, so much more experience in this kind of activity. What is a gastroenterologist doing here?

Probably because the stakes have never been higher and if we don't move and we don't do anything and we don't speak up, who will? Tomorrow will be a very important day. Stay tuned for the next post.

Just like in the US, our representatives also are allotted their very own barrels to use in whatever way that they see fit. Big difference is the utter lack of accountability. Politicians looking forward to an election need to give back a little bit more to their constituents lest they be accused of selfishness. This is the season when vacation-home-building and international junkets are momentarily put on hold. Pork barrel figures prominently among the reasons why politics has become a means to making a livelihood.

But will abolishing the pork barrel solve the problem? Certainly not. It will simply join the long list of widely publicized, painless and short-sighted solutions that don't directly address the problem. Most of the funds come from the significant remittances from our toiling citizens abroad. There is also a new source in the 12% Value Added Tax. When you stop disbursing funds to lawmakers (who really have no business dictating where the next bridge will be built, where the next school will be constructed, where the local health center will be located....) who will the recipient be? Will the money stay with the President? How are we assured that the President will act as a responsible steward for all the excess cash that is literally from the blood of millions of sacrificing Filipinos?

This is why long lasting reform will need to go deeper than mere administrative changes. Our leaders need to do a lot of serious prayerful reflection and find their way back to their original noble goals. We all need to return to the principle of "first things first". Poltics of virtue and politics of duty. The dignity and the development of each person must be the single most important priority of the State.