Bad news, good news

THE BAD news for the President is that his performance rating has dipped from +64 last November to +51 this March, a pretty substantial drop of 13 percent. Much of it had to do with his buying a Porsche. Almost half of SWS’s respondents agreed with the proposition: “President Aquino’s purchase of an expensive car such as a Porsche, even if through his own money, is not a good example for a president of a country like the Philippines.”

That’s not surprising. You knew there would be a fallout from it. It only shows the folly of Malacañang being pissed off with sympathizers like Mae Paner, aka Juana Change, who dwelled on the point in a YouTube presentation, giving Malacañang to glimpse the true sentiments of the nation, the true shape of the public mood. She did not invent that mood, one of aversion to the perceived profligacy, she merely put it into words and images. Alas, then and now power has a way of wanting to behead the messenger.

Frankly, I don’t know how, with all his advisers, nobody thought to tell President Aquino what a bad idea procuring that car was. However with his own money, however it wasn’t new or the latest model, however he needed a replacement for one that had seen better days. Never underestimate the power of image. There is no arguing against it, other with another, more powerful, image. The same powerful image President Aquino sent when he banned the wang-wang, going to his inauguration in relative quiet, stopping at all the lights, is the same powerful image President Aquino sent when he sat behind the wheel of that Porsche.

The Porsche by no means remotely compares to former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s feast at Le Cirque to celebrate the triumph of having met with the US president. Though that was how Arroyo’s allies in media made it out to be (but of course they would). Le Cirque was pure extravagance, and one that, despite the entourage’s ardent protestations, the public knew was paid for by taxpayers’ money. That was how the congressman who paid for it got it in the first place.

What made Aquino’s Porsche a thorn in his side was quite another order of transgression, or perception. Like I said before, if Gloria, or Mike or Mikey, or anyone among their tribe had bought that Porsche, all the public would have said was, “So what else is new?” What made the public sit up and take notice, quite apart from umbrage, was that it was President Aquino who did. He was the one the public looked up to for inspiration, and he failed them. He was the one the public looked up to for example, and he failed them. He was the one the public expected to pass tests of character, and he failed them.

Paradoxically, that is the good news for the President, too.

It shows in what high esteem the President is held by the public, in complete contrast with his predecessor. President Aquino remains pretty much un-dented, to use a vehicular image, except for that fiasco. He should have learned from the campaign how sensitive his image is to public perception. He arose from out of the ashes (his mother’s), or from out of the blue (or yellow), because he was seen as occupying a high moral ground. He was the opposite of Gloria in the same way that his mother was the opposite of Ferdinand. That was what gave him unprecedented voter support in the surveys, higher even what Joseph Estrada ever got, when he wasn’t even a “presidentiable.”

Those same numbers tumbled when his campaign took a detour from the high moral ground, when it forgot its Edsa roots and took on trapo trappings. Or at least when it little distinguished itself from those of the other presidential campaigns in loftiness and idealism. The ease with which his numbers fell matched the ease with which his numbers rose. If that campaign hadn’t recovered its Edsa message in time (“Pag walang corrupt, walang mahirap” is a variation of that, restoring morality as the defining element of the elections), we might be looking at another president right now. Look what happened to Mar Roxas.

If that is so, then President Aquino’s capacity to bounce back from this last survey is huge. It’s not true at all, as his people say, that his dip in approval from last year was to be expected, a tapering off of the euphoria. You grasp the source of the euphoria, you can always avoid falling.

When the SWS survey was taken, two things hadn’t yet happened. The first was the impeachment of Merceditas Gutierrez, which Speaker Sonny Belmonte modestly, though quite accurately, credited President Aquino for. President Aquino’s determination to push his agenda of “’Pag walang corrupt” was the wind that blew most furiously in the sails of the impeachment bid in Congress. So long as Malacañang doesn’t overdo it and isn’t seen now as meddling in the affairs of the Senate (never underestimate the power of image, I’ll keep warning), so long will it boost President Aquino’s ratings in the next survey.

The second is the RH bill. So far, President Aquino has remained unfazed by the strenuousness of the Church’s opposition to it and the show of force, such as the rally in Luneta, accompanying it. There can be no harder test of character for President Aquino. He belongs to a family that is strongly attached to the Catholic Church. During his mother’s time, Jaime Cardinal Sin himself mounted a rally in the Luneta to fight off Health Secretary Juan Flavier’s campaign to distribute contraceptives to the masses. “Mr. Condom,” the Church then derisively called Flavier, which Flavier humorously accepted as a compliment, saying that if he was, he was the Filipino size. This is a case where President Aquino can shine brightly by the power of example, giving the country the image of the reasonable Catholic, the one who holds on to faith in God and belief in country equally tightly.

These are tests of character that don’t just make for better ratings, they make for a better president.