Boy punctures P-Noy bubble on YouTube

Children should be seen and not heard.—12th century proverb

President Aquino’s interview with YouTube on Friday was capped by the last question from a seven-year-old boy named Joshua. The boy asked whether the President believed in Santa Claus and what his Christmas wish was.

The President said he wished people would stop “criticizing anything and everything” and would be more “caring.”  Google executive Ross LaJeunesse, who moderated YouTube’s first Southeast Asia’s World View series, picked Joshua from among a group of mature Filipinos. The interview covered a wide range of issues, including the Mindanao war, the reproductive health bill, the greenhouse effect of the chaotic Manila public transport system and destructive impact of frequent tropical storms crossing the islands.

The question from the boy drew out not so much the President’s world view as it did his view on one of the domestic issues that have disturbed his 17-month presidency: how to deal with the mounting criticism of his campaign to put closure to corruption cases he has inherited from the previous administration and of his unimpressive management  to reverse the  economic slump during his watch.

Joshua is presumed to have no intention of embarrassing the President, and yet it was his question that hit Mr. Aquino’s soft spot. His reply was evasive and did not address the issue of what has really disjointed him. As we shall soon see, it showed that the President has not yet come to terms with the issue that criticism of the performance of his administration—or any administration, for that matter—is fair game in democratic politics. In democratic systems, criticism is the means through which the public sectors, including the press and the political class (i.e., the political opposition), challenge the government to lift its game and deliver on its own pledges. There is no other way to prod an elected government to produce results, or in the case of the Aquino administration to strike a balance between prosecuting those charged with abuse of public trust and of power and administering a transparent government capable of competent economic management. This is the crux of the criticisms that irritate the administration so much.

“Do I believe in Santa Claus?” The President said. “Santa Claus is perhaps the personification of … (the) best in people, the idea of generosity. More than anything, we really have to shift, to those of us still left (from) the criticize-anything-and-everything phase to transforming ourselves into how we can assist our neighbor, our sister, our brother or whoever, somebody we don’t even know.”

Mr. Aquino said people should think of how to contribute “towards the improvement of the whole rather than concentrate on envy or our ability to criticize daily to ad infinitum that leads to nowhere.”

“Perhaps the idea of caring for everybody does not exist only during the Christmas Season but more so is a facet of everyday life that has to be looking out rather than looking purely at ones’ own self-interest.”

The President stopped short of saying that he needs a permanent moratorium to enable him to fulfil the pledges of his Inaugural Address and to accomplish the programs outlined in his first State of the Nation Address.

The President has shown many times his annoyance over press reports on his personal life, and more so with the media’s focus on the administration’s meagre accomplishments in economic management, and the high rate of administrative incompetence, and policy gaffes.

All these accumulated gripes came to a head in his response to an apparently innocent question raised by the seven-year-old boy about Christmas. Mr. Aquino is not unlike his mother, the late Cory Aquino, who nursed slights and grudges. Cory was never vindictive but she had a long memory for resentments. Although she was universally acclaimed by the media for ousting the Marcos dictatorship, there was never a warm relationship between her and the media.

The same distant relationship prevails between President Benigno Aquino III and the media. Media people do not identify with the Aquino dynasty. They perceive it as a class by itself, living in their own world sheltered by the wealth of Hacienda  Luisita.

Mr. Aquino appears to have come to believe that his considerable electoral mandate and the iconic role of Cory Aquino in the 1986 People Power Revolution have given him an entitlement that puts him beyond challenged by media which want to hold him accountable for the performance of his administration.

The essence of adversarial relationship between the media and elected power holders, most of all the President, was not erased by his electoral mandate. That mandate did not empower him to be incompetent or not to work hard to deliver a stronger economy than the one he inherited in June 2010.  His election mandate and continuing high popularity ratings have not given him a mandate to be lazy.

Although no one has questioned so far the honesty of the Aquino administration, this perception is not going to be permanent. Already a number of people have questioned the backsliding by the administration on the enactment of the freedom of information bill, the backbone of his promise to give a transparent government.

The government’s cloak of immunity from accountability for its performance is starting to wear thin. The Christmas truce wish between the government and media on criticism is unlikely to happen.