It’s the economy, stupid!

That very potent Clinton campaign slogan in 1992, which effectively trivialized his opponent George Bush’s foreign policy accomplishments, may have become a cliché. Yet it expresses quite well the mood of our people (the Boss?) after 20 months of the Aquino II presidency.

The dominant temper of the nation: “It’s the economy – high prices and unemployment – we’re concerned about, and not President Aquino’s persecution of the past administration and his campaign against corruption. We don’t care about Chief Justice Renato Corona’s impeachment trial.  And we’ll give Mr. Aquino a year more to address our concerns before we start hating him.”

That’s based on two surveys of 1,500 respondents – in October 2011 and from Jan. 28 to Feb. 6 2012 – by the polling company of Pedro (“Junie”) Laylo, a former Social Weather Stations Fellow who set up his own firm in 1999, and who has a master’s degree in public opinion from the University of Connecticut, home of the famed Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

Laylo improves over the run-of-the-mill SWS surveys, which ask respondents to answer the simplistic “satisfied/not satisfied with the President” questions. Instead, Laylo jogs respondents’ minds beyond emotion-based responses by asking: “Is the country in the right direction under this President?” That’s a more heuristic question.  One may like Erap or Mr. Aquino as persons, but you may objectively assess that he is running the country towards the wrong direction.

Based on the 2012 polling, 35 percent of respondents think that the country is on the right path, 40 percent undecided, and 25 percent replied that it is going in the wrong direction.  A few months after Mr. Aquino became president, nearly 70 percent replied the country was going in the right direction.

That there’s now a huge 40 percent undecided means that many are no longer buying his chest-beating bluster and celebrity imaging. Combine that with 25 percent replying that he is leading the country in the wrong direction and that means a big 60 percent of Filipinos, as Laylo puts it, “anxious” over Mr. Aquino’s leadership, with top concerns being high prices and unemployment.  Laylo showed me an unreleased finding of his survey: that most Filipinos are giving Mr. Aquino only one year to shape up – just in time for the 2013 elections.

What is revealing is that the January-February 2012 results are basically the same as those in the October 2011, in which 35 percent replied that the country is on the right path, 39 percent undecided, and 27 percent on the wrong path.

That means that Aquino’s two major initiatives since October, namely the Nov. 19 arrest of former President Gloria Arroyo on trumped-up 2007 election charges and the impeachment and demonization of Chief Justice Renato Corona, have been irrelevant for our people, not affecting positively or negatively their assessment of Mr. Aquino.

To better understand our people’s mood I did some arithmetic on Laylo’s data, to come up with the following percentages of replies:

2011 Survey         2012 Survey

Anti-corruption tack working /                            16                         15

Aquino doing his job

(1) Prices going up                                      11                         15

(2) Unemployment                                     9                           10

(3) Corruption unabated                                      9                           8

Total of “it’s -the-economy                        29                         33

-stupid” items 1 -3 :

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Changing the name of Diosdado Macapagal International Airport to Clark International Airport is either a shameless display of this administration’s pettiness and vindictiveness, or a classic case of a sycophant going overboard to the point of inanity, just to please his new boss and keep his job.

Clark International Airport Corp. president Victor Jose Luciano, who boasted that his board changed the name on its own, claimed that “based on a survey among pilots,” the airport is known as “CRK,” a contraction of  “Clark,” and therefore it should be called Clark International Airport. (“Clark” refers to Major Harold Clark, who died in a seaplane crash in Panama in 1919 but who had nothing to do with the former military base.)

Luciano doesn’t seem to know the most basic facts about the aviation industry.  “CRK” isn’t a name pilots invented, as he claims. It is one among the 4,000 three-letter codes for airports decided upon by the International Air Transport Association (IATA).

It seems beyond Luciano’s comprehension that airports are often named to honor great leaders (JFK airport, Charles de Gaulle), as well as distinguished citizens of the places where they are located.  The Davao airport (IATA code:  DVO) is named Francisco Bangoy International Airport, after the city’s first congressman and pioneer.  The one in Caticlan (code: MPH) which really services  Boracay is named Godofredo P. Ramos Airport, after the congressman who sponsored the bill that created the province of Aklan.

Using Luciano’s reasoning, Ninoy Aquino International Airport should be reverted to its old name Manila International Airport  because its IATA code is MNL.  First put in his post in 2004 by former President Arroyo, and held over by President Aquino, Luciano certainly reminds one of philosopher Immanuel Kant’s observation, “Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.”

It is only fitting that this new international gateway to the world would be named after the area’s most prominent citizen, the President who boldly started – even if extremely unpopular then – the globalization of the country in the 1960s.

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