Running against the Bondocs, old and new, in the fourth district is a metaphor. You just don't run a race; you climb a mountain. And it isn't just any mountain; it's like Mt. Everest, with all the degree of difficulty and risk that it suggests.

Many have tried and never heard from since, here or in the hereafter. There's one like Edmund Hillary I know who did try and succeed, but does anybody know where he is now?

Sun.Star accepts donations for victims of Typhoon Ondoy

Rene Maglanque, a political victim of the Bondocs not once but twice, is running again for the third time, knowing excruciatingly fully well how it is to climb a treacherous mountain and fall on the wayside. This time around, he swears he has learned his lessons well and is as sure as a veteran hiker that he will make it to the summit in one piece.

What those lessons are, except for one very obvious and elementary, he did not share with media invites over a friendly lunch the other day. Two candidates from the same town is sure defeat, he basically said, and he would not allow that to happen again. Of course, he needed to be reminded that that is exactly what's shaping up to be, unless it is within his powers to change the course of events. Board Member Ric Yabut, a political upstart as ambitious as he is, comes from the same town, Candaba, and raring to conquer the mountain of old, partly because it is there proverbially.

Rene said Ric is a cousin and sounded like he could talk him out of his plan - Ric's plan. His optimism about Ric appears to make the challenge a bit manageable, not easily achievable by any stretch of imagination. One lesson that should stick in the mind is Rene's defeat in 2007 against the lady incumbent when he was the lone candidate from Candaba. And this one negates the other lesson in logic.

In other words, it takes more to get to the top and plant your banner there.

Which explains Rene's audacity. He's out definitely to make history, whatever the outcome. He either wins and dethrones the pedigreed Bondoc or takes his third loss, and go down in history for the distinction, hilarious or victorious.

In the first place, does Rene even have a strategy for conquering the mountain?

From where he sat at lunchtime, his was to erode the mountain, trigger sizeable landslides and push what remains of it to the side. In other words, test and attack the integrity.

Let us count the ways he thinks he can get the job done. Rene points his finger to unsolved flooding and unfinished, even incomplete, roads. He rails again district hospitals that have been left to seed. And the jugural: there's only contractor in the district, for some reason, and the only explanation is connection to the powers-that-be.

Rene is also riding on the Noynoy caravan to get his campaign going uphill by joining a party that rose from the dead. It could be a parade or a funeral. There is also the problem of crisscrossing political ravines: Rene is an Arroyo loyalist now supports an Aquino who, to put it civilly, is far from an Arroyo admirer. This all-Kapampangan witch brew can be toxic to local politicians who unwittingly jump on the other side of the cliff, the wrong one.

He also thinks doing a Dong Gonzales of the third in the fourth will add up. Of course, there are few political Houdinis still left, but you are either one or a hoax, and it's always too late to find out.

Rene, indeed, seems a perfect poster boy for political audacity. Whether that's enough to take on a mountain and conquer it deserves another friendly lunch after May 10 next year.