fullman*

24 days before D-day. If I don’t do this now, I won’t be able to do this at all.

The challenge is to blog about the campaign trail, an entry a day. I’ve told someone before that I’ve been remiss with my blogging duties because of the campaign – the hectic schedule, and the rare lulls that are oftentimes spent to catch up with errands that are left behind.

Why not blog about the campaign trail, he suggested.

He’s right. A senatorial campaign is a strange monster . You jump in, you get swallowed. I suppose writing about it would make it easier to digest.

There is more familiarity in a party-list campaign: you deal with constituents you’ve worked with, the niches are clear, and the scale follows boundaries that you have traversed in the past. You know your hooks, you’ve been there, you’ve done that, and you know the limits of the system itself. It is a known playground.

But now, the campaign trail doesn’t end. The next day and its own mob of tasks, statements, and meetings have a way of creeping from behind, without warning, an intruder that has the gall to welcome you to your own home. A week becomes a continuous, seamless loop of days. Before you sleep, no matter if its at 2 or 4 am, you need to meet your deadlines, and then wake up early so you could do some finishing touches, make the sound bite sharper, or the point more resonant.  You are completely aware that it could be for naught, especially in country where politics is a narrative of personal dramas, not of platforms or issues. So you just go ahead, praying that what you’re doing can make a dent.

I admit that there are moments when we ask ourselves why we are doing this. The party-list race is our comfort zone, and had we opted to limit ourselves in that arena, the campaign trail would unfurl with a certain predictability – the kind of messages you can and cannot deploy, the numbers you need to crunch. A party-list campaign would still be hard, but definitely not as hard as a senatorial bid.

But in the middle of the daily grind, we constantly get reminders why we are here – an old woman who handed Risa some money as contribution to her campaign; a student who professed his support, unabashedly, and delivered what is perhaps the most compelling speech about change that I’ve heard since this campaign started; the father who introduced Risa to his young girl, and started conversing with her as people went in and out of the LRT. All of these happened when we weren’t preaching to the choir, while eating in Jollibee or while in transit. It is when we are with them that I realize that we haven’t lost our moorings.