EDITORIAL - First 100 days

Toledo City Mayor Sonny Osmeña is correct in refusing to come up with a report on his first 100 days in office, like what has apparently become a habit with most elected officials. "I don't think anything can be measured in terms of a hundred days" was how Osmeña put it.

A veteran politician with an illustrious career, Osmeña couldn't have said it better. Indeed, what is really there to report in a hundred days? Not that no one can do something within that time. But to trumpet anything in so fleeting a moment can be dangerously misleading.

The suspicion is that the first one hundred days is just a creation of a media that is always in dire need of stories that sell. After all, it is a need that can always be exploited by the publicity savvy p.r. machines of politicians and it would not come as a surprise if one feeds on the other.

There is no real basis upon which to give importance to anyone's first one hundred days. One can put all his energies to accomplishing something within that period for effect and then take an extended vacation for the rest of his term.

Or one can genuinely be calculating and deliberate and thus have nothing to show for the first one hundred days and then finds his stride later and finishes his term with a big kick that no one takes notice of anymore.

And then there are the many twists and turns and other variables that no hundred days can ever take into account for. These twists and turns and other variable of governance are probably what will truly make or break an administration, not the first one hundred days.

Yet why have we become so enamored with the first one hundred days. Maybe it is because Filipinos never get over the elections. Filipinos are just as politically oriented as the real politicians, the only difference being that one remains a private citizen, the other chooses to get elected to public office.

But for either, it is always about politics and election. The first one hundred days is a good jump off point for the "see-I-told-you-so" discussions that invariably take place after the election itself. Making choices and needing reassurance are inseparable twins. We always need to know if we chose right or wrong.