On the other hand, if these were all a bunch of made-up issues, all of which seems to end at the President’s doorstep, then this is one of the biggest, best-orchestrated act of calumny this country has seen. As a people, we seem to have the greatest difficulty to work together. That an attack on the President has become the sentiment of a nationwide community already speaks volumes.
While a small band of vocal militants and oppositionists are making headlines, the result of the latest survey does indicate that they share the sentiments of the majority. The President seems to have arrived at the lowest point in her career yet, the survey showing how majority of the Filipinos no longer believe in her.
Whether the scandals surrounding jueteng, recorded conversations indicating cheating in the last elections, misuse of public funds for her election campaign, and so on and so forth, are true or not, – in the larger context of the public good – is no longer the issue. When the President announced that she would no longer seek reelection because she realized that she was the cause of divisiveness in the country during that infamous speech of December 2002, she was not only concluding from her experiences during her first term, but was being prophetic about the deteriorating state of her second term.
I do not recall any other time when a majority of Filipinos spoke with one voice and one message since the EDSA revolution against Marcos. Some even say that the mass action that forced Joseph Estrada from Malacañang did not fester as bad as this. In this case, it feels like a silent yet seething rumbling is spreading over the populace, perhaps akin to the eerie quiet that comes before the arrival of a tsunami.
The President is not entirely to blame for her woes, however. Many of the events inflicting more suffering on the citizens are the result of a far greater power than of a presidential decision. Rising oil prices in the world market and the migration of foreign investments to other parts of the globe that arguably are the preferred investment regions (such as China and Eastern Europe, for instance) have been a bane for our country.
President Arroyo says she feels the pain that the people are suffering. But that declaration is rather belated, considering that pain has been part of the Filipinos’ existence for as long as they can remember. Declaring her empathy now only smacks of posturing and insincerity.
Given that the President’s job is a thankless one, and no single decision she makes can please everyone, it rather seems, however, that the President has been getting more than her share of political brickbats lately. She may have never wished for it, but she has been at the center of a maelstrom of protests not only within government but also among the general populace. It all goes back to her Rizal Day speech about her being a cause for divisiveness.
The nation has not really forgiven the President for that fatal "I shall not run for President" speech. She had enumerated all the right reasons for not wanting to. Like the ghost that haunts, those reasons continue to haunt her and to reverberate in congregations where people discuss the future of this country. To those who listened intently to her speech and believed her, her running for a second term was a betrayal and proof that she did not mean what she said. Her trust level therefore has gone eroded.
That is what animates President Arroyo’s public persona now. Rightly or wrongly, her troubles may be traced to the image that she has been portraying before her public. Damning jueteng issues are nothing new; every President of the Philippines has had to grapple with it (although not to the extent that their families were implicated, except for Joseph Estrada, of course). Accusations of electoral fraud have been leveled at other Presidents before, and none have prospered.
If the United States had a so-called "Teflon President" in Ronald Reagan, many people believe we have our "Super Glue President" in Gloria Arroyo. Throw mud at Reagan and it just slides off. Do the same with Arroyo and it will stick, permanently. The press has not helped by replaying that incriminating recorded telephone conversation over and over again; if, indeed, these were fraudulent, the on-air repetition would have done more damage to her credibility, anyway. (Mass media still wields a powerful and uncanny influence on its audience – repeat any message enough times and people will believe it to be true.)
I suspect that one of the reasons why not enough people have taken to the streets to ask her to step down is the lack of options available; the opposition does not have a viable alternative who can rally the people to action. The vice president remains to be an unknown (and insignificant) factor. In marketing-speak, President Arroyo as a product does not have any real competition that can seriously threaten her position of leadership. Consequently, the consumers will continue to use that product, notwithstanding its quality (or lack of), for lack of alternatives.
Continuing the analogy, making false product claims can be severely damaging to a brand. It may sell your products initially, but the consumers eventually wise up to the scam and your product gets dropped like a hot kamote. With the current administration, many promises have come and gone – announcing a deadline to end jueteng and drug pushers, and a general’s subsequent announcement that, indeed, the country was 100 percent jueteng-free – only to be proven wrong. Of course, there’s that December speech as well.
Clearly, the President’s problems are more than skin-deep; no amount of image-building will repair the underpinnings of her Presidency. Her credibility hitting an all-time low, her family members like lightning-rods for controversies, her cabinet and administration shooting off their mouths without giving thought to the consequences (What’s the big deal about journalists getting killed, said one of her sycophants?) and a bunch of confused PR handlers whose heads must be spinning right now.
These are tough times to be the President of an embattled republic. A credibility-challenged President can only make matters worse. Even as she tries to address the overriding economic challenges that the country faces – and the jury’s still out regarding her administration’s performance on this – it is imperative that the rifts that threaten to break this country apart be addressed, before the ominous rumblings become strident calls for radical change.
The President is scheduled to address the nation in her regular State of the Nation Address (SONA) in a few weeks. I believe that if she were to go back and discern the essence of her speech in December 2002 and try to capture the spirit and the reasons behind her message, she would find the source of and the solution to the problems that now bedevil her presidency. In her report in the forthcoming SONA, the nation will expect no less from her than an honest and sincere accounting of her decisions and actions since Rizal Day of 2002.
A house torn asunder? With what we experience around us, the answer is obviously a yes. This is a real challenge to our national leaders, marketers, and communicators. They must quickly examine where we really are, and why are we there, and seriously craft a "how do we get there plan" that can arrest the decline.