Congress, content creator

THE late Senate President Aquilino "Nene" Pimentel Jr. once proposed the "three Cs" — short for competence, courage, character — as criteria for electing people's representatives in government.

But that proposal hardly resonates. Voters, election results show, must have their own preferences. A look at the members of Congress today, for example, will suggest that voters are perhaps guided by another set of "Cs," namely: 1) being fed up with politics (rationalized as "whoever gets elected runs the same corrupt government, anyway"), they approach electoral processes with cynicism (bordering contempt); 2) because they hardly care, what comes to mind — which means, more often than not, celebrities and popular media personalities — is good enough; and 3) popularity has nothing to do with the candidate's competence and, worse, may even have the effect of hiding his or her criminal record. To test the third criterion, we can ask: how many currently sitting elected officials have been indicted — some even convicted — for breaking the law?