It is not inconceivable to think that a few seconds after the clock struck midnight yesterday (Sunday), candidates for the various elective positions became engaged in a mad race to find the best spots to place their campaign materials.

It’s not just the bets for national positions either. Even candidates for the lowliest local positions act much like drug addicts, except that instead of drugs, they have an insatiable craving for any empty space to put their names and photoshopped faces.

Their generic messages will say that they are pro-this and anti-that. Let’s see. They will proclaim themselves pro-God, pro-country, pro-Filipino, and pro-family. They will be anti-crime, and anti-graft and corruption.

What they will have a hard time deciding is if they are pro-life or pro-choice, but if they want to win the Catholic vote, they will be inclined to go for the former. But those going after the women’s vote will mean that they will have to take the latter stand.

The smart candidates who want to win the vote of Catholic women will take a neutral stand. Or worse, they will be pro-life when invited to address a church-going crowd, and miraculously convert to pro-choice when facing feminist voters.

The smartest candidates will avoid the issue altogether. Such is the way of Philippine politics, circa 2013.

While the Commission on Elections says that tarps, posters and the like can only be placed in select areas, no one really follows this rule. Even when the poll body forms brigades to remove the illegally placed campaign materials, new ones will very quickly replace those which have been torn down.

There’s just one little problem. The election period began yesterday, but the campaign period does not begin until later. That campaign period differs for candidates for local and national positions. Naturally, senatorial bets will have a longer time to try to convince the electorate to include their names in the “Magic 12,” although I’ve always failed to see what is so magical about it.

If I were to vote this May, I would definitely not vote for any candidate whose posters and tarps overwhelm the city. Having too many means they probably overspent heavily, and will thus try to recoup their “investments” via creative allotments of their pork barrel allocations.

Growing up in Pasay, our family compound had a nice cement wall facing the street. We had a sign saying “Post no bill” spray painted in several places on the wall. Every election season, even the sign was covered by…guess what? Candidates’ posters, of course. I guess ours was a premium location since the compound was just off Taft Avenue.

Looking back, we should have put an addendum: Violators will be shot. Or tarred and feathered, at the very least.

The savvy candidates for local positions know one thing: their chances of winning become higher when they see, meet and shake hands with more people. This is because most voters want to have some sort of personal connection with the person he or she votes for, no matter how fleeting.

It is therefore imperative for a candidate for congressman, mayor, vice mayor and councilor to press as much flesh as possible.

In this election (not yet campaign) period, the adrenaline of the candidates will be pumping like crazy. The funds that they saved up for their election or reelection bids will start flowing outwards, and woe to the candidate who has no control of his or her cash flow. As election day nears, that outflow of cash will turn into a tsunami, except for those whose wells have suddenly and unexpectedly run dry. There’s a word to describe such poll bets—losers.

For the national candidates, much of their cash will be spent for radio and TV commercials, while for the local candidates the bulk will go to what the ad agencies refer to as collaterals. These are the giveaways like t-shirts and caps, plus all sorts of printed materials like tarpaulins, posters and flyers.

Bookstores, meanwhile, will experience a spike in the sales of plain white envelopes which will be stuffed with crisp bills of various denominations. Sometime next month, however, small red envelopes with embossed gold designs will be the favored means of distributing funds to supporters, with the collaterals declaring Kung Hei Fat Choi to all.

Remember what church leaders have said about those bribes? Accept the cash but vote according to your conscience.

Such smart clerics we have, huh?

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