Game-changer 4

The die is cast.

A new energy infects the political arena. A new understanding about our political engagement for the future must now take hold.

Noynoy Aquino is now in spiritual retreat in a convent in Zamboanga. We are certain he will emerge from that fortified. He needs to achieve both discernment and calm.

He will stand the eye of a great storm. The calmer the eye, the stronger the storm.

My doctor, who has been involved in politics at its most intense, severely tortured in the darkest of days, announced to me in all soberness in the quiet of his clinic: the Yellow Tsunami is coming. He always speaks in haiku. I took that as an instruction to brace myself and be fit.

In a matter of a few days, the governing paradigm of our electoral politics will change. We must think and rethink quickly to understand its dimensions.

Mar has yielded. Ed Panlilio, Jessie Robredo and Grace Padaca have formally thrown their support behind a Noynoy candidacy, saying he is the man to galvanize the forces of reform in our society.

Last Wednesday, during his press conference, Noynoy allowed us an important glimpse into his thinking. Asked how he could possibly finance his campaign considering his own meager financial resources, he said only an alternative strategy will work. If he mounts a campaign no different from the type mounted by his questionably moneyed rivals, all is lost.

A new discourse on our politics is emerging with much hopefulness. It is contesting the old discourse that still captivates the minds of the traditional politicians — and their allied militant groups that have degenerated rapidly of late.

An example of the old discourse is that totally irrelevant air war erupting between former President Joseph Estrada and Sen. Panfilo Lacson.

Estrada, as we all know, has been going through the motions of a presidential campaign for months now. He says he is 99.99 percent sure of gunning for the presidency, all for the entirely incomprehensible goal of “self-vindication.”

Lacson initiated the sniping, chiding the deposed president for calling on the opposition to unite and then causing disunity in the ranks by pursuing his own self-serving agenda. Estrada’s spokesperson fried back immediately, saying Lacson enjoyed no standing to say what he just said, having caused the division of the opposition in the 2004 elections. The Estrada camp blames Lacson’s stray presidential run for the defeat of the former president’s proxy candidate, Fernando Poe Jr.

This bitter word war between two characters with no love lost for the other is waged in the old, obsolete discursive field that continues to see the forthcoming electoral battle as one between “administration” and “opposition.” They insist on fighting yesterday’s war. The rest of us would rather fight for a new future.

All that funny bickering between who is “opposition” and who is not is so yesterday. The configuration is changing rapidly and irreversibly.

Regardless of how many candidates there might be left two months from now, this election will be a battle between two modes of politics, two irreconcilable constituencies. It will be between those who breathe and think politics-as-usual and those who dare hope for the possibility of a genuinely new politics.

The old lines of division are lost. The new lines of differentiation are being drawn.

The forces of reform seek to substitute persona for personality, principles for patronage and program for mere popularity. It is not just the administration that failed us. It is traditional politics that failed the nation miserably. We are all the more miserable because of that.

It is that failure of politics-as-usual that we now must confront. We cannot confront that with the usual categories by which we contemplated our politics. Those who insist on thinking about politics in the old way are lost.

This might well turn out to be an effective two-candidate race, reflecting the polarization of constituencies. It will be a struggle between past and future.

On one pole, the purveyors of money politics will congregate. They will organize a centralized, costly campaign reflecting the old mindset: hierarchical, premised on command-and-control, driven by self-interest, dictated upon by the powerbrokers and others who may be relied upon to follow the scent of money.

Around this pole will gather the traditional politicians and all who continue to imagine that the contest is about who will collect the spoils of power at the end of the day. This will include the opportunist mainstream of the Left, who are brokering the votes they imagine they command by means of their capacity for armed coercion in exchange for a share of the pork barrel. They are, after all, children of Stalin.

On the other, emerging pole, are those hopeful forces trying to open more avenues for the unorganized and the non-partisan to participate in defining a new future for our country. They might, at first glance, appear diverse and spontaneous. But there is a much more reliable bond holding them together. It is called vision.

These hopeful forces have, thus far, managed to surprise even themselves in their capacity to change the rules of the game. They have already broken the grip of the politicians over the presidential game by forcing them to yield to a people’s draft.

These new forces are the children of Edsa. They sense that what we have on hand is more than just a presidential campaign. It is nothing less than a Revolution.