WHEN we fly or fall in love, we often do it head over heels. How heartwarming if that would be the same way to go between election candidates and voters.

Commitment, sweeter if consensual, ought to animate our political engagement. Or to the whorehouse goes all our romantic notions about elections, and this innocent idea: The act of voting is supposed to be the foreplay for a government as good as post-coital fulfillment.

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No lip service, please, on how to renew a nation. What it requires is “big ambition and a better kind of politics,” says American author and Harvard University professor Michael Sandel.

His bestselling new book “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” might as well be the Kama Sutra for a delightful democracy.

Something that desires, he notes, a heightened sensation for public discourse.

Does that stir a ripple here on our side of the shore? Life is a beach once more, if you’d see the politicians who are out to frolic and take us by the hand to a honeymoon. Come, creampie! Here’s a prolonged erection all the way to the election.

Does the body politic—the electorate of a republic—shiver in a swoon? Last time this voyeur looked, the ardor was still up if news about high turnout in voters’ registration were a red-hot indication of political passion.

An 80-year-old paralytic on his wheelchair was even reported to have “braved the thick crowd of registrants in Cebu City…so he can guide his grandsons in exercising their right of suffrage, and choosing the right candidates.”

But how do we pick them? How do we know our politicians, like pearls, are real?

Shining examples, so far, are as distant as a beached starfish and the galaxy. And where platforms are as substantial as sand castles, all too common is the same old shadow play. The good, the bad, and the ugly among our candidates are still out to leave us comatose in a gang-bang tangle of personality over issues. Oh, baby, how do you solve a problem like cliché?

Time and again, enlightenment is of the essence. But less benighted is the Comelec even as it prepares for “full-swing information dissemination on poll automation.” And like an invalid on matrimonial bed, the Comelec’s spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

Not so coy about this confession is election officer Marchel Sarno. As reported, “they cannot go all-out in their voter education because they themselves have not been trained yet on the new process.” That, come to think of it, must be no less esoteric than mastering the ways and means of tantric sex.

But, hold your breath, change is gotta come. The most senior aspirant for the post of Cebu City mayor, for instance, is trotting off with the “hippest political campaign materials now available— YouTube and Facebook.” Taking his cue from Barack Obama’s techno-savvy candidacy, former senator Sonny Osmeña is hot about the fact that there are approximately 100,000 personal computers in the city.

Talk about faith, and he’s confident that his “political issues” will be more compelling than, say, Internet porn. Now this is more tempting when the alternative he’s ardent about so far is a moan, a mouthful against the persistence of indecency: the lowdown of electoral fraud going high-tech.

Leave the succinct ideas for nation-building and a better world to the rote memorization skill of scantily clad contestants in beauty pageants. As far as the ballot-obsessed bets are concerned, there’s nothing more exciting than the go-getting exertion of gaining the upper hand. Jerking, you bet, while they are running.

(geemyko@gmail.com)