Big dipper

EDWIN LACIERDA’S explanation for it, of course, is that it’s the fault of the columnists.

Well, most everyone has already commented on it, which is that it’s a case of shooting the messenger. If the kid is shouting that the emperor is naked, then that must be the kid’s fault, his vision must be faulty. When in fact Lacierda should be looking more closely at the state of their own eyes: Inbreeding among courtiers has a way of making them see finery on the emperor’s body where there is none.

Either that or Lacierda is giving columnists way too much importance. Well, I can’t say I blame him. Not all columnists are created equal. Some are more important than others. One or two are positively brilliant.

But we may safely put Lacierda’s explanation aside. So the question remains, what truly has made P-Noy’s approval rating fall?

My own explanation is this: It’s the gap between what the people expect and what they get. The expectation is huge, the fulfillment is little. At least that is how the perception goes.

It’s the price P-Noy has to pay for being plucked out of relative obscurity before the elections and being delivered to patent glory afterward. He was the good against his predecessor’s evil, he was the Cory to Gloria’s Marcos. He became president because he was more than a candidate, he was a symbol. As such he was expected to be larger than life. The last thing he can do is show himself to be smaller than it. Or put himself in a position where he can be depicted as so.

Three things in particular have done so. None of them has to do with policy, all of them have to do with personality. None of them has to do with government, all of them have to do with temperament.

The first is the Porsche. To this day, the issue rankles in P-Noy’s mind; he cannot understand why the media made a big deal of it. Just as well, to this day it rankles in the public’s mind; it cannot understand why he purchased it in the first place. Doubtless it can be defended in all sorts of ways. But the thing is, like he himself, that car is more than a car, it is a symbol. It is nothing like GMA’s splurge at Le Cirque, but then P-Noy is nothing like GMA. The public expects GMA to spite them in their hour of travail. It does not P-Noy.

The astonishing thing is why none of P-Noy’s advisers had the eyes to see what a bad idea it was, or the balls to tell him so. It wasn’t the media that created the fuss over it, the public itself did.

The second is the accusation that he is lazy and spends more time with play than with work. It’s thoroughly unfair, and something his communications group should have snuffed out long ago. The accusation is coming largely from the GMA camp, which is meant not just to put down the one person that can hound GMA for her epic crimes but to rehabilitate her in some way by drawing a contrast between her apparent dedication to work and P-Noy’s lack of it.

P-Noy’s communications group could always have said: “But of course P-Noy is too lazy—to lie, to cheat, to steal. He is too lazy to steal the vote, to enrich himself, to murder people. But he is industrious in other respects. He is industrious in fighting corruption, in upholding the rule of law, in making the poor less poor by putting public money at their disposal, pag walang mandarambong, walang nagugutom.”

But they did not. And failing to nip the lie in the bud, they turned it if not into the truth at least into something that has the sheen of it.

And third is the perception that he is indecisive, vacillating, unable to put his foot down. The family feud within his government, which came to the fore in the aftermath of the hostage crisis last year, gave the public its first view of it. It can’t get any better with the entry of Mar Roxas there, it can only get worse. Much, much worse.

Just as well there was his decision to wash his hands off the issue of burying Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, a thing that hasn’t sat well not just with Yellow Force but with the public in general. P-Noy isn’t expected to be moral only in the sense of being abstemious, only in the sense of being personality virtuous. He is expected to be moral in the heroic sense, in the sense of possessing moral courage. Passing the buck on this one doesn’t speak very well of having vast reserves of it.

You don’t need to go far to find proof of public expectation of it. Leila de Lima is reaping the highest marks for it. Under normal circumstances her show of feistiness and independence would resonate well with the public (Miriam Santiago nearly became president because of it in 1992). In the abnormal circumstances of P-Noy’s presidency, it takes on even more abnormal weight.

Even P-Noy’s anticorruption campaign is impaired by the fact that it hasn’t touched GMA yet. It has touched other people, including the generals, some GMA stalwarts, even the ombudsman. But it hasn’t touched GMA. The idea that P-Noy has been hampered by Gutierrez holding on to her post until recently presumes GMA’s greatest crime is stealing money, or corruption in the narrow sense. It is not. P-Noy should have haled his predecessor to court long ago for stealing the vote, for stealing freedom, for stealing lives.

Taken singly, these things can be very debilitating. Taken collectively, well, there are the numbers to show their effects. Not all of these can be solved by spinning, or by better communications response. The charge of laziness may, the charge of not taking charge where needed and not taking a stand where it matters may not. The latter can only be answered by doing, or doing things differently.

P-Noy continues to enjoy a great deal of public trust and goodwill. He can always turn things around.

But neither he nor the public can wait forever.