In and out

P-Noy’s explanation was that it was Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s fault, which the public naturally scoffed at. His argument was that the public was incensed about the P10-billion Janet Napoles scam it drove them to the streets. Which was his predecessor’s doing. Napoles wreaked her harm under Gloria’s tolerant, even appreciative, gaze. His government merely got sideswiped by the furor that arose over it.

That’s all very well except for one thing: The public isn’t just furious about the Napoles scam.

There is of course a sense in which P-Noy’s argument rings true. That is that the sudden public disaffection over government isn’t just spontaneous, it is also whipped up. Specifically by the various PR groups whose job it is to draw public ire away from Napoles and the senators and congressmen accused of conspiring with her and direct it toward government.

How well they’ve done their job, you see in that in little more than a month, the P-Noy government has gone from aggressive to defensive, from the high of the State of the Nation Address to the low of the Disbursement Acceleration Program. Up until Aug. 26 when the “Million People March” took place, government still stood on high moral ground. Renato Corona appeared there and was roundly booed, the marchers making it perfectly clear they were against pork and not P-Noy, they wanted pork abolished and not P-Noy ousted.

Then, everything unraveled.

That is where the fault of others ends and government’s begins. How did it happen?

One, government has a communication system that does not communicate. How it could possibly not have prepared for this onslaught is incomprehensible. It was predictable, it was expectable: Of course the accused who face jail time are going to defend themselves and have the money to do it. And as every strategist knows, the best defense is offense.

But government’s communication department has been unprepared for challenges like this from the start. That department has three de facto secretaries who are not talking to each other. They are Ricky Carandang, who is now no longer to be found except when P-Noy takes a trip abroad when he suddenly reminds the world he is still alive; Edwin Lacierda, who is a lawyer, who goes on to explain everything in a way Joker Arroyo finds amateurish (for being visible, he is one of those who has suffered a plunge in ratings); and Sonny Coloma, who has the communications skills but is kept to administrative and organizational functions.

So long as P-Noy was enjoying record approval ratings, that bizarre situation could have lasted indefinitely. He is no longer so. His ratings slip further and it could reach a point of no return.

Two, the problem isn’t just communication, it is also performance. That is the bigger headache for the P-Noy government, given that its hitherto huge political capital has lain in an unassailable moral ascendancy. That moral ascendancy has been assailed—a fall in ratings by 15 percent is so—from a couple of blunders.

The first was allowing Napoles to surrender to the President himself and both the President and his alter ego, Mar Roxas, visiting her in Laguna. Why was she being treated with kid gloves, an irate public demanded to know. She may be an extraordinary crook, but she is also just an ordinary criminal. Detractors promptly added fuel to the fire by suggesting that government officials, if not indeed P-Noy and Roxas themselves, might have had dealings with her.

It didn’t help that Roxas, for reasons known only to him, kept calling the prisoner, “Ma’am Janet.”

The second, and more serious of those, was P-Noy not giving up pork. By the beginning of September, it had become apparent that the public wasn’t going to be appeased by promises to reform pork. It was past reform, that public said, not least in the couple of rallies that followed the Million People March. The subsequent rallies of course paled before the first one, but what they lacked in physical space, they made up for in cyberspace. It was unacceptable, they said, that P-Noy would appear to abolish PDAF only to keep it in another guise. “Don’t take us for fools,” Peachy Bretaña, organizer of the Million People March put it trenchantly.

It helped even less that government’s use of its own pork took on the aspect of giving an additional P50 million in PDAF to the senators who voted against Corona. Arguably, there’s nothing to show that the money went to the senators’ pockets or was plunked into Napoles-type NGOs. This was not a case of theft or pillage, government insisted. But the whiff of bribery, as its detractors bluntly called it, chipped at the high moral ground. By the standards of the past regime, it was nothing. By

P-Noy’s own standards, or those of “daang  matuwid,” it was everything.

It helped still even less that the money came from something that, as the constitutionalists who rose to condemn it pointed out, had no legal leg to stand on. That is the DAP, which is an invention of the budget secretary, Butch Abad. Again, there was nothing to suggest it was necessarily evil, it might even have done good by stimulating the economy and sparking the record growth. But the fact that the President had no power to shuffle money from department to department, and that it had been used in one instance for the less than salutary purpose of influencing the outcome of a trial, however the public approved of that outcome, invited censure. And censure accepted the invitation.

Can the P-Noy administration get out of the bind it’s in? Well, it depends on how it responds to the things that got it into that bind in the first place. It retains pork, the DAP, and its messed-up communications system, and the tunnel could be very long with no light at the end in sight.

Time is ticking.