From meltdown to showdown

Never make a big decision when you’re angry, hungry, or happy,” Ferdinand Marcos Sr. told Time Magazine in 1974. His son seems to have taken this to heart. It would have been well for the Vice President to take it to heart, too. Instead, she started a race. The winner of the race would be the one able to effectively deliver this message: “Don’t you dare!”

If the Dutertes succeeded, it would’ve nipped in the bud efforts to defang and declaw them; failure to succeed would mean success for the Marcoses and Romualdezes. On Monday, it became clear who’d won the race. It was the President. The irony is that it was the Vice President who fired off the starting gun, so to speak; she did so, by forcing a change of pace on the President and his people: in what observers called a “meltdown,” the Veep declared that she’d made arrangements for the President, the First Lady, and the Speaker to be bumped off if she ended up bumped off. She emphasized this was no joke.

She was acting true to form. In our infamously free-wheeling and sloppy political culture, the Marcos-Romualdez method for achieving political success is to play the long game, combining relentless pressure with overwhelming force while exercising strategic patience. In other words, the boa constrictor style of political operations. The Duterte style is shock and awe: explosive brinksmanship to intimidate opponents into backing down or backing off, zeroing in, when needed, on specific enemies to clobber in order to make an example of them. In other words, the silverback gorilla style of leadership.

What’s been happening is shock and awe has been failing when confronted by the long squeeze. As their tried and tested methods have stopped working, they have started making political decisions in a blind fury, so that the Dutertes responded to provocations with wild abandon, repeatedly raising the ante regardless of whether they could actually survive having their bluff called. The former president tried to rally the cops, the police top brass was purged; he tried to summon people to the streets, no one came; his party was raided; his access to friendly broadcast facilities were cut off, his allies, as his clout diminished, found themselves in jail; all he had left was himself.

The Vice President, like her father, ultimately decided to use herself as a human shield. In her father’s case, he had to do it, facing the Senate and then the House, because the police officers he’d used in the so-called “war on drugs” started to give evidence; in her case, she had to do it, because her own staff began to corroborate the paper trail carelessly left for the House and the Senate to follow.

In the end, her former coalition partners-turned-enemies proved more daring. She couldn’t, though she tried, stare down the cops: force of will wasn’t enough; she could stare and shriek but it didn’t stop her staff being detained for contempt, and carted off from one place of detention to another. She herself had dared to refuse to testify under oath, only to have to relent and do so, in the end. To be sure, there were tears and sobbing, as her staff were taken away from her. Perhaps enough to tug at the heartstrings of the loyal.

But the loyal stayed home. How could they do otherwise? The Veep is the daughter of the man who’d crowed he’d repudiated People Power and all it stood for: a brand of leadership that would do everything—even assume the moral burden of ordering liquidations—on the followers’ behalf. That would have been all right if the leader still had lieutenants, but without the presidency, neither a Veep nor an ex-prexy can stand up to an incumbent chief executive—not without the clergy, civil society, the media, the army, or business. The first three have lost their clout; the last two, much prefer the status quo. When the President, not following his own timing to be sure, but not about to cede the field after a direct challenge, either, laid down the law, the public immediately saw the difference: lawyers, lawmakers, law enforcers, soldiers, to name just a few, all took their cue from him and pronounced the Veep and ex-prexy guilty of going too far.

In achieving restoration, the President figured out something the ex-president and the Veep still haven’t figured out: how to innovate and learn from past mistakes. Having never lost before, and never experienced being challenged and defeated, the Dutertes may lack what it takes to win.

She became the latest Vice President to foolishly think receiving more votes—in a separate contest, against much less formidable foes—than the President, makes for a formidable rivalry. Against this generations-old delusion are generations-old political realities: Vice presidents are expected to cooperate with presidents; and the veep who breaks away, suffers in the judgmental eyes of public opinion.

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