What we should have really copied from US-style democracy

here is one good feature of American-style democracy which we did NOT copy. I don’t know why—nangopya na rin lang tayo sana nilubos lubos na—but, no.

In a US election, they don’t count the votes for vice-president. That’s because there are no votes cast for vice-president. A vote for president is a vote for him AND his vice-presidential runningmate, whose name is not on the ballot.

When a US presidential candidate wins, his VP automatically wins too. But he does not carry his VP-runningmate with him to the Whitehouse. Instead, this VP drives farther down Pennsylvania Avenue, to the US Senate building where he sits as the Senate President.

In other words, when Americans go to the polls to choose the top two officials of the federal government, it's “BUY ONE, TAKE ONE.”

So while Democrat Joe Biden sits as United States federal president, fellow Democrat Kamala Harris is vice-president but sits as Senate President. However she cannot vote, except to break a tie.

Every US president is second-fiddled by a vice-president belonging to his own party. He sleeps well at night because, naturally, his party will not plot his downfall. His VP will not sabotage his policies from within, or try to upstage him in public relations projections.

In contrast, here in the Philippines, we have split-voting for president and vice-vice president. Fernando Lopez was the last vice-president to belong to the same party as his president Ferdinand Marcos in the pre-EDSA era.

Post-EDSA, only VP Noli de Castro belonged to the same LAKAS party as his president Gloria Macapal Arroyo in 2004. In all other elections, it was always a chopsuey combination:

FVR (Lakas) had Erap (PMP) as his VP in 1992;

Erap (PMP) had GMA (Lakas) as his VP in 1998;

PNoy (LP) had Jejomar Binay (PMP) as his VP in 2010;

Duterte (PDP-Laban) had Leni Robredo (LP) as his VP in 2016.

It’s easy to see why historically most Philippine presidents are allergic to their vice-presidents, as evidenced by how much love there is between Duterte and Leni.

This split-voting arrangement was tailor-fit for the Pinoy culture strongly-influenced by the political tradition of the balimbing. Most “polite” Filipinos can’t say “NO” without batting an eyelash. You have to give the Pinoy voter some wiggle room. That way when he is approached by two kumpadres campaigning for opposing parties, he can say, “Alright, Kumpadre-A, I will vote for your president but I hope you don’t mind I will vote for the vice-president of my Kumpadre-B”

What’s wrong with this picture? What is missing? Why—political maturity, of course!

If you mix black and white, you don’t end up with black or white. You end up with 50 shades of grey—a government that is ambivalent on every policy issue, and a national leadership that cannot build consensus because higher in their agenda is destroying one another first.

It’s the formula for disaster because stymied intentions will not be denied. It will look for a way to penetrate institutional barriers and guard rails meant to serve as “checks and balance” of the whole democratic system. What supplants it is a system of brokered alliances.

Instead, the president grooms his own kennel of loyal senators and congressmen who don’t have the least scrupples about preserving institutional independence. Why? Because there's an umbilical cord connecting the Office of the President with both the House Speaker and the Senate President who can be replaced anytime by the handpicked choice of the President.

The president has to dip his fingers in the affairs of a supposedly "co-equal" branch of Government because he has no assurance that the Senate president is his permanent ally. In the American model, US senators do not aspire to become Senate president because there is no way to ascend to the position. Here, the president controls the dynamics of this chamber's leadership contest so openly that he can even broker “term-sharing” agreements in a “win-win-everybody-happy” arrangement.

The president is not only a virtual king, he is also the sole kingmaker. Therefore, to curry favor with him, all must affiliate with his “ruling party.” So our error of not copying the “buy one, take one” setup also spelled the death knell of any meaningful “multi-party system.”

Instead what we ended up having is a “multi-system party” with everyone competing for the President’s blessing by any manner that can catch his attention.

My skin crawls everytime I hear a senator refer to the president as “Mahal na Pangulo.” The only other country in the WHOLE WORLD where you hear terms of endearment being applied to the highest official like that is North Korea, whose brainwashed citizenry call Kim Jong Il “Our Dear Leader.”

It is only in the Philippines where you find the specter of two senators running for president jockeying for position of who will "slide down" to the VP race so that an outgoing president's daughter can raise her sights higher and gun for the presidency.

In the American model, you can't have a fake presidential candidate (pati ba naman presidente napepeke na rin?) because you cannot "slide down" to the VP lane. That slot is filled up automatically by the presidential candidate who cannot have as his VP runningmate another presidential candidate.

Such a long explanation, but I can shortcut it for you. In the US election, there is no substitution of candidates, period.

That's why you can't see a US senator sucking up to a US president, unlike here.

It’s totally disgraceful when you see a senator--let alone TWO--behave in so subservient a manner you’d think the Senate was an attached agency of Malacañan. If he could only find the right doctor, one senator would lose no time having his lips permanently sewn to Duterte’s behind.

Two senators in diapers (I'll use that term again!) running for President? Now both of them taking turns crying a river on national TV over the prospect of having to "give way" to Inday Sara?

Yeah, right.

Either senator running for president was never true for one second.