“The official campaign period hasn’t started yet so there’s no violation.”

That in a nutshell is how those personalities with running political-advertisements-disguised-as-public-service-ads  defend their early campaigning. While, technically correct it’s just a flimsy excuse as far as I’m concerned.

The funny thing is when it comes to their failure to give the public even just a sneak peek of their platforms these same personalities — or to be more accurate their supporters — would say something like this:

“We can’t come out with our platform at this time. We don’t want to violate the rule on early campaigning.”

As the comedian Joey de Leon would say, “Acheche!!!”

Much credit goes to the blogger known as BenignO who came up with the catchphrase “Platform, plez!” which will serve as a reminder to all candidates to stop inundating the electorate with motherhood statements, empty promises and all other types of crap. As suggested, bloggers who choose to write about the candidates and their failure to provide any specific platform should just append the phrase to their posts.

Another blogger BongV came out with a similarly commendable follow up. In his post titled “Benchmarking the Presidentials” he attempts to provide a simple way of evaluating the so-called presidentiables. Using tables, BongV gives us an overview of key issues and where some of these presidentiables stand. The data provided by BongV is far from comprehensive and complete but, as I noted, it’s better than nothing and it’s a good start. I’m hoping he will come up with donwloadable pdf versions of his tables. All voters should have their copies.

Related to this, PinoyBuzz pointed out to me that maybe some candidates are deliberately making their political ads as revolting as possible to attract the masa crowd. I agree with his view. It has become quite obvious that many politicians and their media handlers are guided by the public relations notion that “bad publicity is still publicity.” (Come to think of it Former President Joseph Estrada did get himself elected thanks in part to his Eraptions, which as I recall was the brainchild of publicist Reli German.)

Well, I think it’s about time we wisen up to this cheap gimmickry. I had previously recommended villifying any and all silly political ads. I realize now that doing that will just give these stupid political ads more mileage.

In Smoke.ph, blogger Rom wrote a post in which she basically calls on political bloggers to put a stop to all the shallow punditry.

She writes:

And pundits – both on-line and in the mainstream – continuously feed the egos of these wannabees by devoting column-inches and blog posts to their merest utterances. But more than just feeding egos, this predilection to writing up every little off-the-cuff remark, every bluster, and every knee-jerk reaction of these aspirants for the presidency (not presidentiables, mind you, because in the strictest sense of even that made-up word, they are not presidentiable) adds the patina of legitimacy to what would otherwise be dismissed as plain and simple chicanery.

And…

The pundits are no help. When was the last time you read an article that tried to delve deeply into what a Roxas presidency would do for the country? Or an Escudero presidency? All you can read nowadays trivialize the presidency into nothing more than a prize to be won, hence the proliferation of attempts at pseudo-thinktankish analyses of who will most likely win. All that does is engender the belief that it is better to pick the winningest candidate than to support the one that will do the best job.

I’m hoping these ‘calls’ for a more educated screening and selection of political candidates will gain steam.

Candidates take note.

Platform, plez!