Fizzled

The scandal-driven effort to shake the Arroyo presidency appears to have fizzled out.

The events of the last two weeks indicate this to be the general, albeit haphazard, design of the effort: explode "scandal bombs" in quick succession; drive the public to intense outrage; then, in the resulting confusion, establish some sort of rallying point to force an extra-constitutional succession.

The whole operation must be completed in a hurry, before the public recovers its sobriety and steps back to review the real proportions of things. Public opinion must be rushed to draw the desired conclusions. The more excitable elements must be pushed to action.

The scandal-bombing part was easy.

We have a scandal-driven mass media that follows every whiff of controversy like a brainless herd. The inevitable outcome is the undue magnification of the significance of exposes and hearsay testimonies. Public hearings, the principal preoccupation of our legislature, provided highly visible staging grounds for scandal-mongering.

The outrage part appears to be a little more problematic.

True, the timing was good. The principal target of the operation, the President of the Republic, was wallowing in record low job approval ratings. Inflation was taking its toll on consumers. Spiraling oil prices made the future look bleak.

But the public responded rather tepidly to the scandal bombing. There was no rallying point offered. The "revelations" were, in the end really confirmations of what the public knew: jueteng was the basis of the politics of patronage since time immemorial and, as the audiotapes suggest, our electoral process remains flawed and vulnerable.

No doubt, the political blitz has taken its toll on the administration’s capacity to govern. It deepened public cynicism of our institutions. But it did not completely rip away the legitimacy of those who now govern us.

Granting that voting outcomes in Lanao del Sur were massaged, could it have altered the final outcomes? The best counter-evidence is that Barbers lost and Biazon won. Therefore, if the numbers were massaged, they were not massaged well enough to alter the outcomes in the closely fought battle for the last slot in the senatorial win column.

The public stepped back from the brink. Our people would not be rushed into a rising – even if there are disturbing ethical issues and moral concerns. These are issues and concerns we ought to continue sorting out and addressing.

Chaos is not the best setting to contemplate the afflictions of traditional politics in this country.

Besides, the "heroes" we were supposed to flock to were flawed characters. Some of them are patently insane. Some are clearly impostors.

When the supposed "heroes" presented themselves to the public flanked by clowns and communists, the public decided they would rather be entertained.

And entertained the public is: with the slew of clever text jokes and crazy ring tones, with mockery heaped on the funniest officials of the land.

The worst component of the design for this political blitz is that it is open-ended. There was no clear plan for a follow-through, no clear end-game. So much was left to spontaneous political action and political accident.

It was as if some idiot lit a fire in dry forest and then hoped the resulting conflagration would sweep in the direction desired.

If there was a large circuit of conspirators in this political blitz, they did not act in concert. Those who wanted a coup did not calculate the disposition of the military. Those who wanted an outright resignation by the President did not properly take into account her stubbornness. Those who wanted to establish some sort of provisional revolutionary government have simply left their fantasies unbridled.

The fact that the same troublemakers were speaking in so many voices tells us that they were more confused than the general public they wanted to lead to a cataclysmic path. That is the final measure of their political incompetence.

This was a badly orchestrated chorus. If they could not so much as orchestrate themselves, how dare they aspire to orchestrate the historical course of events? The Keystone cops appear better coordinated than this band of hysterical conspirators.

Then comes Joseph Estrada, offering to head a junta.

That is the last nail in the coffin of this chaotic blitz. The whole effort is now doomed to be buried in the shallow grave of utter hilarity.

For a moment, the Macapagal-Arroyo administration seemed on the brink of disarray. It was clearly taken aback by this sudden blitz. Its pointmen began tripping and over-reacting.

The last few days, it appears the Palace has gotten hold of its act and adopted a clear crisis strategy: talk tough, refuse to dignify the scandal-mongering, refocus the public on the governance issues and desist from pandering to the congressional sideshows.

That is the only feasible strategy, although there are enough sympathizers who disagree with it. Any other approach will add fuel to the unwarranted fire, make administration personnel party to the circus the opposition wants to stage.

But taking the wind from the sails of this badly-designed blitz is the easy part.

The more difficult part is climbing out of the hole this whole episode dug for us, restoring credible leadership to a battered nation and restoring a path to a future where institutions work and the economy functions. Although political survival is more or less assured, the integrity issues must be dealt with convincingly.

We await the President’s State of the Nation Address to indicate directions out of this mess.