Mr. Contreras, please be in it to win it!
Y ou might know Ben Contreras as the longtime local columnist who writes about pressing issues in and around Cagayan de Oro City. If you’ve been following the news lately, you already know that Mr. Contreras has decided to throw his hat into the CDO mayoral race. To me, this is great news – after all, the person best suited to run this city must be one who’s lived here all his life and therefore must be intimately familiar with it: its culture, its heritage, its politics, its business scene, everything.
While the decision to run for mayor is in itself a bold move indeed, I find it a little sad that Mr. Contreras “has no illusions of winning” despite his good intentions. Mr. Contreras tells our editor-in-chief Mr. Aguilar that “As a writer, I just want to vent my sentiments.”
Being a writer myself, I agree. However, being a candidate for the highest elected office in CDO is a completely different game: it’s not just a matter of giving your ideas a larger audience, but also seeing to it that you win and therefore gain the political power to make your ideas a reality at long last. I’m sure that being a veteran columnist Mr. Contreras has thought up many ways to make this city better. If all that matters is merely sharing how he thinks things ought to be, then why not remain just a columnist? In this day and age anyone with a blog and a smartphone can play journalist, but not all writers get to be newspaper columnists. In the eyes of the general public, to be published in a newspaper as a regular columnist is to possess a certain legitimacy, influence, and therefore power that run-of-the-mill bloggers can only dream about.
My point? As an established writer, Mr. Contreras actually wields more power than he gives himself credit for.
Although words do have power, on their own they can only do so much. As a Lynyrd Skynyrd song put it, “All I can do is write it in a song.” Alone, words can change minds and shape sentiments. But couple your words with political power, and you’ll find that you can move mountains and so much more.
Therefore, my advice to candidate Contreras is this: please be in it to win it. If you are sincere about your vision for Cagayan de Oro City – and I believe that you truly are – then you must do everything in your power to make sure that the mayor’s seat is yours after all is said and done.
You say that you find to be extremely distasteful the exorbitant amount of spending on election campaigns. A lot of people agree! However, that doesn’t mean that there has to be no spending at all. You still have to promote yourself, especially considering that you’re a newcomer to the game of politics. If getting campaign donations are out of the question, then perhaps you can do as then-candidate Rodrigo Duterte did and encourage your supporters to make their own campaign materials. These days, they’re not expensive to make.
And speaking of Duterte: before announcing his candidacy for president, he said that he only consider running if he was sure that he would win. There was a lot of hemming and hawing that happened since he spoke those words, such as making it appear as though he only wanted to remain Davao City’s mayor and nothing more. But I’m sure that behind the scenes, he was already drawing up plans and putting them into action.
Mr. Contreras, ours is the Age of the Non-Politician. Duterte was no big player in politics when he decided to run for president, and neither was Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. Vladimir Putin was only a spy, and Donald Trump had no track record in government whatsoever. Being a nonpolitician in a swamp full of traditional politicians can be the edge you need to win, and as a lifelong citizen of Cagayan de Oro, I implore you: please make the most of it!