Captive audience

A writer once observed, “Politicians can forgive almost anything in the way of abuse; they can forgive subversion, revolution, being contradicted, exposed as liars, even ridiculed, but they can never forgive being ignored.” If presidents are the supreme expression of being a politician, then the State of the Nation Address (Sona) is the supreme politician’s delight, because it guarantees, literally, a captive audience. Every president, in fact, only gets this guarantee seven times in their presidency: at their inaugural, and six times before Congress in a span of six years. Considering the fuss–months of bureaucratic preparation of alleged facts to support supposed policy prescriptions, weeks of stage-managing combined with group writing—and the expense—never mind the reams of paper or man-hours spent on PowerPoint presentations, but consider the deployment of police, online listening and messaging, and helicopter fuel charges—I’ve always wondered why critics, who, regardless of whoever happens to be president at any given Sona simply don’t show up and reveal that the emperor has no audience. Then I remember our radicals and oppositionists are all politicians, too. Birds of a feather…

Since 1992, our presidents have been held captive by the ironclad rules of the game, which ensure a minimum of achievement at a maximum of expense, because to do otherwise dangerously strengthens the presidency and weakens all other interest groups, which can only function if a balance of overall nonachievement is sustained. The more things don’t change, the more satisfying the demand for change, because it will result in a turnover of power and a scramble that ensures that at the end of all the exertions (and extortions), everyone is precisely where they’re already comfortably off, because predictably situated to begin with.

It goes like this: the inaugural address is a declaration of intent, and it combines with the first Sona as a declaration of means, which is all a president can do, as he has merely inherited a budget; the second is more properly, the first outline of what a president wants to do, now that he is unencumbered by an inherited budget; the third Sona is a humble-bragging campaign kickoff for the midterms (which are a referendum on the incumbent); and the fourth Sona is either a victory lap or acceptance of defeat in the recently-concluded midterms; the fifth Sona (today’s) is the last push to get tangible things done, since the sixth and last Sona is the valedictory, when, hoping against hope, a president tries to anoint a successor to see if anyone still cares; it marks the informal start of the long campaign for the next presidency.

From June 28 to July 2, Pulse Asia conducted a survey asking people to state what they wanted to hear in the Sona. A sign of the times is that the top issue the public wants to hear President Marcos discuss or mention is his administration’s fight against corruption (29.8 percent), with two subsets: first, efforts to investigate and hold accountable those involved in the flood control projects scandal (18.9 percent), and second, anticorruption initiatives in general (10.9 percent). The only other double-digit concern is the issue of affordable basic goods (18.7 percent).

I’ve always believed the public has its own wisdom if you only set aside your preconceived notions to try to understand it; and at the core of public opinion—and public expectations—is something the Greek writer Callimachus wrote around 250 BC: “Being a thief myself, I recognized the tracks of a thief.” Since the 17th century, this has come down to us as “set a thief to catch a thief.” Which is the logic behind looking to the government to catch its own, in what can only be described as the crudest, yet boldest case of collective grand larceny in the already crooked history of our current republic. The Sona survey tells us this represents a constituency: close to 30 percent for whom fighting corruption is a motivating cause.

Last Sunday, Randy David identified a major, potentially dominant, constituency: “What we are seeing is a single constituency, fixed in its geography and its class … Mindanao and the Visayas, the D and E of the country’s economic life, and the urban poor of the capital. It reveals itself wherever a viable candidate credibly embodies the kind of authority it is looking for.” At present, that authority is incarnated in either the Vice President Sara Duterte or Sen. Bong Go, who “can draw 49 percent as principal, or 27 through a substitute.” But there is a subset of this that is represented in the largest chunk of the public expressed in terms of what it wants to hear from Mr. Marcos in his Sona.

According to Pulse Asia, “The fight against corruption is the top response not only in the country as a whole but also in Metro Manila (35.0 percent), the rest of Luzon (32.7 percent), Mindanao (29.7 percent), Class ABC (42.1 percent), and Class D (29.6 percent). In the Visayas, the most often cited issues are affordable prices of basic commodities (22.7 percent) and corruption (19.3 percent) while among those in Class E, the leading issues are affordable goods (23.8 percent), poverty (15.9 percent), and corruption (13.8 percent).”

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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3