Monthly Archives: April 2010

The Long View: The lunatic fringe

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The Long View
The lunatic fringe
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:40:00 04/28/2010

IN 1950 MARYLAND SEN. MILLARD TYDINGS (of Tydings-McDuffie Act fame) ran for reelection—only to face a remarkable smear campaign. It included a doctored photograph purportedly showing him conversing with American Communist Party leader Earl Browder (suggesting Tydings had Communist sympathies, immersed as he was, at the time, in a fight with his fellow senator, Joseph McCarthy). An open letter was also circulated among voters, which darkly accused Tydings of having a sister who was “a thespian” and, worse, a brother who was “a practicing homo sapiens,” the technical terms for a sister-actress and brother-human, apparently helping to contribute to the veteran senator’s defeat.

A similar low opinion of voters—and disregard for anything resembling reality—seems to afflict those who are hell-bent on planting seeds of doubt about Sen. Benigno Aquino III’s fitness for the presidency, though with conspicuously less success. Since it has proven extremely difficult to rake up any muck about Aquino, the plan of attack seems to revolve on simply inventing something, using the media to propagate fiction in the hope it accomplishes one of three things:

First, it could fool the gullible or reinforce existing biases against the candidate: this particularly applies to those who have remained loyal to President Macapagal-Arroyo and her cloud cuckoo-land tales of legitimacy and accomplishment. Second, it might bog down the candidate in having to disprove rumors, allowing his rivals to pursue their own campaigns unchallenged and unimpeded. Third, simply by existing, the stories can take on a life of their own, never really proving anything but adding to the insecurities of some, who might then use it as an excuse to withhold support for the candidate, a variation of the first objective.

At the heart of the tall tales is the suspicion that no such thing as an honest, principled politician exists; or, put another way, anyone who considers himself a politician running on a platform of honesty, integrity, and good governance (and who personally represents all these things) has to be delusional or an imbecile—and that goes for his supporters. After all, a central talking point of the administration has been, “they are all the same, anyway,” so better the devil you know since no angels exist. But since it is a proven fact Aquino exists, then the only thing left to do, since he has no crimes—no lying, cheating, or stealing—is to accuse him of being either a half-wit or psychologically unsound.

A gruesome parade of columnists shuffled forward to try to do this. First, they suggested Aquino was autistic—only to have the chronology they put forward fall apart upon closer examination. Next, they insisted that a psychological report so crude as to be obviously a fake had to mean something, even though it was a forgery. Only in the weird world in which Palace loyalists exist could their subsequent logic—that even if fake, Aquino was duty-bound to prove to the country he wasn’t mentally disturbed—make any sense.

When that backfired, they backtracked and said Aquino’s people did the inventing to try to deflect really damaging information to come. Only for their partners-in-interest to take up the tale where it left off, as Guido Delgado did the other day. Only for the second fabricated report to end up debunked, as the first one was, by the Ateneo de Manila’s psychology department. All the while further implicating the Nacionalistas (and their administration fellow-travelers) in their unrelenting scheme to try to plant seeds of doubt concerning Aquino’s mental health.

None of this would have been possible without the uncritical acceptance of these documents as newsworthy by the media at large. Putting forward fake documents is, of course, a newsworthy story. It involves, to begin with, the possibility that confidential medical records can be leaked, which has profound ethical implications for medical practitioners (which is why one related allegation had to involve a doctor safely dead, for the purposes of those who tried to propagate the tale). It also involves the horror media outfits have over being given potentially explosive, but ultimately false, information.

And it is in the public interest to know that both the Palace’s friends and the Nacionalista leadership see fit to fabricate stories, regardless of whether or not it gets otherwise Palace-friendly institutions such as the Ateneo de Manila into a needlessly embarrassing situation. Anything goes, so long as it torpedoes a historic verdict against the administration and its allies in the polls.

But what puzzles me is why the contents of two entirely fabricated documents should, in themselves, end up reported, thereby lending credibility to all the related stories being put forward as part of the larger plan to erode public confidence in Aquino. The first report, flimsy to begin with because signed by a priest who isn’t even a psychiatrist, could have easily been checked by referring the document to the priest and the relevant department. As for the second report, it was also denounced by another priest, an eminent personage in his field, who says he never signed any such thing, and the same department—but not before the document and its contents got extensive airplay as a story in itself.

What this means is that media jumped the gun, merrily accomplishing the aims of those who forged the documents by reporting their contents and only afterwards informing the public that, by the way, they were blatant forgeries. This adds fuel to the glowing embers of manufactured scandal the Palace and Nacionalista drumbeaters have been vainly huffing and puffing to turn into a public relations fire.

It seems these people have taken the industry’s measure and found it wanting in the extreme.

The Long View: Avoiding a majority at all costs

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The Long View
Avoiding a majority at all costs
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 21:16:00 04/25/2010

WITH two weeks to go before Election day, there are four competitions simultaneously taking place when it comes to the presidency and vice presidency. The first is, of course, for frontrunner Benigno Aquino III, to maintain and improve his status. The second is for second place, between Manuel Villar Jr. and Joseph Estrada. The third is among everyone else, so that they can make a respectable showing and perhaps open up the possibility of a Senate bid in 2013 and another run for the presidency in 2016.

In a similar manner, the endorsement by Sen. Francis Escudero of Aquino and Jejomar Binay can be viewed as the opening salvo, not only in a fight for influence in a possible Aquino administration, but also in the 2016 presidential contest in which current vice presidential frontrunner Manuel Roxas II is expected to be the leading presidential candidate. Binay’s gunning to displace Loren Legarda from second slot in the vice presidential race also serves as positioning for 2013 and beyond.

From 2005 onwards, the phrase in vogue was Malcolm Gladwell’s “[The] Tipping Point,” the point when “levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable”—though it became clear by 2006 that none would be reached vis-à-vis President Macapagal-Arroyo. Then in 2009, another phrase became current, “Black Swan”— from Nassim Nicholas Taleb who borrowed a line from the poet Juvenal: “a good person is as rare as a black swan.” Put another way, a Black Swan Event, according to Taleb, is something no one expected, and that no one foresaw, and indeed viewed as impossible in the manner that everyone assumed all swans were white until black swans were discovered in Australia.

The Black Swan Event was the death of Cory Aquino, who had stubbornly stuck to principle against the President but led an increasingly lonely crusade until her death led to the Great Awakening and the Great Remembering. That event has propelled what the administration—and everyone who shares a similar approach to political power and authority—fears might become a Tipping Point. If, as Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr. sniffed (with reason) in 2005-06, that critics of the President were too focused on “manufacturing a People Power moment,” thus failing because these things can’t be scripted, then Cory’s death restored the proper perspective to the fight against the President, her methods, and her people, one put forward by Aquino herself in 1987: to restore democracy by the ways of democracy, that is, by means of an election.

This was where people’s inclinations had lain all along, explaining the intense dislike for the administration while holding back public support for methods that might terminally imperil our country’s democratic project. And it has starkly defined the present presidential contest as one between the administration and those inclined to pursue its methods, and those against it.

The paramount objective then, has been to prevent the frightening possibility of a majority presidency serving as a definitive referendum not only on the President but the attitudes she represents—and represented by those who have clung to her—which dates back to the showdown between the public and the dictatorship in 1986. Even as she tries to maneuver herself out of the constitutional deadline she tried to remove, an effort that meant pursuing simultaneous strategies ranging from supporting multiple candidates to frustrating the results of the elections. One thing is sure: she will pursue a scorched-earth policy to the end—and that means trying to neuter the presidency for any of her potential successors.

There are many ways to hobble a potential successor—like cheating the person out of office and this includes whittling down the results precisely to prevent a majority victory. This emboldens the forces out to resist the next administration, while weakening it so that it is perpetually presented with the temptation to follow the President’s decade-long policy of purely transactional politics. (She has been portrayed as immoral, which I think may be inaccurate; rather she is amoral in the pursuit of power, something she shares with those who view government as a business.)

The last two weeks then are all about trying, by any means necessary, to deny there can be something like a Tipping Point or, as it is traditionally referred to in politics, the onset of the bandwagon effect, when a campaign not only overcomes obstacles in its path but regains an upward trajectory and secures a momentous victory.

But if one were to argue there is no such thing as a bandwagon effect, then, one could argue as well that the power of an administration machine to deliver is a myth. Which is the countervailing impression the President and her people want to foster—formally, by means of their token official candidate, and informally with their unofficial candidate, regardless of its impact on public opinion. The administration has proven that what people think matters less than what access to limitless money, coercive power, and a lock on institutions can accomplish.

The thing is, precisely because there’s been a Black Swan Event, the old assumptions, the existing expertise, are less potent than before. It will be interesting to see if the combined interests of the administration, the Nacionalistas and everyone else deathly afraid of a defeat in a referendum on the past decade—which is what this election is, nationally speaking—can still pull it off.

Can they reduce the mandate of whoever will be the next president, to the extent that the next chief executive will be hard-pressed to even wield the genuine powers of the office? That is, if they can’t prevent a victory in the first place? Can they plant enough doubts to poison a possible mandate with the same cloud of illegitimacy?

The Long View: Silence means consent

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The Long View
Silence means consent
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 21:54:00 04/21/2010

JUSTICE SECRETARY ALBERTO AGRA MAY HAVE calculated that after an initial outburst, the public would eventually turn its attention to things other than his letting off the hook two high officials from the Ampatuan clan, Zaldy and Akmad. After all, when rebellion charges against members of the clan were dismissed (showing how flimsy and indeed, purely tactical, the rebellion-as-justification for martial law in Maguindanao was) hardly anyone expressed surprise”or even dismay. Perhaps the Palace interpreted this as a sign of waning public interest in the Ampatuan Massacre.

Timing is everything in politics, which is why the Palace likes to release bad news or engage in controversial acts on weekends, when most people aren’t really tuned into the news. It is why the Palace had to let ARMM Gov. Zaldy Ampatuan off the hook, now, when its various candidates need all the help they can get, and not, say, after May 10.

If, as the saying goes, there are no permanent friends, only permanent interests, then the reasons for doing the Ampatuans additional favors now rather than later suggest this is not about friendship but rather a convergence of interests. The same convergence that saw this administration raising the clan to nearly-unheard of levels of influence in the ARMM, to the heights of position in the national structure of the ruling coalition, and which has focused the administration less on giving justice to the victims of the Ampatuan Massacre and more on keeping the Ampatuans close enough to keep them useful in 2010.

The problem is that while the Ampatuans had to be let off the hook in time to be useful in the elections, they, too, helped make matters worse for themselves and for the President, though this shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering how what should have been a smooth alliance was nearly wrecked by the Ampatuan Massacre itself. Last Thursday, Andal Ampatuan Jr. brandished two ballers proclaiming his support for Nacionalista Party candidates Manuel Villar Jr. and Gilbert Remulla. He even bragged that he was confident of being absolved of the charges against him if Villar would win the presidency. Photographs of the grinning Ampatuan caused a national sensation, coming on the heels of a crescendo of endorsements for the various candidates, including Jose Ma. Sison’s formal anointing of Villar.

Two days ago, Ampatuan Jr. was, of course, singing a different tune, and brandishing different colors, in a typically brazen attempt to do damage control for the Nacionalistas as could be imagined.

Noemi Paron, widow of one of the massacre victims, bluntly pointed out what the whole stunt was about: reverse psychology. The stunt, she said, would not affect her support for Benigno Aquino III. He has, after all, been consistent in condemning the murders and expressing sympathy and support for the victims; his questions during the joint hearings of Congress on the proclamation of martial law helped demolish the government’s case. In contrast, Villar gave a bean counter’s response to mass murder and completely sidestepped the real issues: the extent to which the administration, military, and police were complicit in the massacre and the shoddy case they made for martial law. Instead he kept asking what the economic implications of the massacre might be. So much for the victims, so much for the horror of what happened.

There is no escaping the fact that the Ampatuans were able go berserk because they had been raised to the heights of power by means of impunity. Impunity conferred by the support of an administration dedicated to the forms of legality disguising the essential impunity of its methods and ambition. Fr. Eliseo Mercado has chronicled this in a series of articles that also debunked the latest tactic of the beleaguered Villar long ago: Ampatuan Sr. lost his position after Edsa, regaining it only after free elections were restored; yet even then only becoming Supreme Warlord under the present administration.

Obviously, then, the last thing either the administration or the Nacionalistas wanted was for the public to be reminded in whose corner the Ampatuans really stand. It turns them into a political issue just when they’re most needed. And it rubs salt in the wounds of the families of the victims who are now in the position of being surprised at the independence of state prosecutors, who are themselves caught in the dilemma of being ordered to participate in setting free the most politically useful Ampatuans.

It’s all very well to point out that the President took an oath to do justice to every man, but just what a sham that solemn oath has been reduced to can best be demonstrated by the manner in which our latest Secretary of Injustice and Raul Gonzalez who formerly held that title, supports Agra on this”defends his quashing of the murder charges against Zaldy Ampatuan.

Essentially, Agra’s defense is the tried-and-tested administration reasoning that: 1. It is presumed legal because officials like himself did it, and the President has not said anything to the contrary; 2. Indeed, since silence implies consent, it means as a creature of the President, she basically did the throwing out of the case; 3. If you don’t like it, you can take Agra and the President to court, all the way to the Supreme Court, if you please; and 4. If you don’t like it, why don’t you impeach the President? Otherwise everything has the presumption of legality and all opposition is merely political noise.

But the rewards outweigh the risks. A senior Frankenstein coalition official privately confirmed the findings of a poll commissioned for internal purposes by Ronaldo Puno, which has Aquino leading Villar by 18 points (41 to 23). It’s crunch time for the Palace and its candidates.

The Long View: A campaign of attrition

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The Long View
A campaign of attrition
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:48:00 04/18/2010

WHEN the great awakening and the great remembering last August led the country to dare to dream once more, it rendered the pragmatic calculations of those seeking the presidency obsolete overnight. Manuel Villar Jr. had achieved front-runner status “the 25-percent survey ratings that conventional wisdom said could create a bandwagon effect” precisely at a point when his percentage suddenly paled in comparison to the numbers achieved by Benigno Aquino III. When Manuel Roxas II declared his support for Aquino’s candidacy, it served as an aftershock, further rocking the political landscape. Tremor after tremor followed, from the collapse of Francis Escudero’s presidential bid to former President Estrada throwing his hat into the ring.

There were other factors that led to the change in landscape. The adoption of automated elections led to the filing of candidacies taking place in November instead of January, but the campaign’s official beginning in February was retained, leading to an artificial gap when filing was supposed to seamlessly shift to campaigning. The Supreme Court helped things along by deciding that so long as the official campaign period hadn’t started, no such thing as premature campaigning existed.

This provided an opening for candidates like Villar (awash with the resources required for such a gambit) to try to catch up, which he very nearly did, by means of flooding the airwaves with commercials. But success eluded him; he failed to overtake his leading rival, and worse, failed to maintain an upward trajectory in his rankings just as the limits on ad spending kicked in; his ratings continued to slide when the local races began, and with it, the mad scramble for local alliances.

As Villar pursued his blitzkrieg strategy, Aquino was hampered by the very nature of his campaign as one defined by self-control. He would not “and could not” make deals simply with anyone, since his is a fundamentally centrist campaign: hence the extreme Left and Right ended up with the Nacionalistas, and the utterly unredeemable, erstwhile stalwarts of the administration ended up slithering to the NP as well. Out of the good graces of the administration, Aquino could only be sure of the strictest application of the rules themselves subject to increasingly unusual reinterpretation and redefinition by the state’s institutions. And so he had to bow out of a televised debate as the old rule for premature campaigning would have kicked in between parts 1 and 2 of that debate: except the Supreme Court decided matters in an unexpected manner, leaving Aquino a no-show, ironically, because he had scrupulously abided by the rules.

As the front-runner, Aquino was thus in a less flexible position, tasked with safeguarding a formidable constituency, while cobbling together a coalition more inclined to hard-line attitudes than his easily accommodating rivals. At first this led to a campaign viewed as unwieldy because argumentative within; but in a few short months it started coming together just when his rivals’ campaigns began to founder and fray.

His rivals used this as an opportunity to chip away at his formidable numbers; if the main attack came from Villar, the other candidates too ended up targeting the fringes, like wolves circling a large and unwieldy flock, picking off the stragglers. Yet their combined efforts haven’t succeeded in dislodging Aquino from front-runner status: leading to the possibility that his momentum could increase. The possibility of an outright majority is not impossible it may even be probable as the bandwagon effect kicks in locally. Local leaders have to follow their voters’ national sentiments, and in many provincial areas Aquino’s lead has expanded to twice the percentages of his leading opponent.

This close to the end of the campaign, the only question remains whether anything can happen that could change the balance of forces. Two are generally discussed: the potential disqualification of Joseph Ejercito Estrada and the bowing out of the race of Gilberto Teodoro Jr. Neither, however, seems inclined to throw in the towel, having committed to the race and out of a dogged loyalty to their followers and close associates.

Estrada’s entering the fray was made possible by the Comelec, his political usefulness to the powers-that-be ranging from setting a potentially useful precedent for Ms Arroyo in the future and his upsetting everyone’s calculations in this campaign: except he has proven more harmful to Villar than Aquino. Whatever happens, Estrada has proven he will be an influential player past 2010.

There’s a kind of parallel between the campaigns of Aquino and Gilbert Teodoro Jr., in that both have strong constituencies known for their passion and ambivalent (at best) and hostile (at worst) attitude towards the political pros. Teodoro tried to redeem the Frankenstein coalition but was reduced to being a minor experiment, and a failed one. Yet his own political salvation may lie in being proven a patsy; a humiliating situation to be in but which has the sort of pathos that can actually fire up his genuine supporters and increase his standing.

Whether this will be enough to give him a future past 2010 depends on how he decides to go down to defeat: as the nominal standard-bearer of a coalition that demeaned him, or as someone who, better late than never, stood foursquare by his genuine supporters and denounced the President and her people who never even gave him a fighting chance. This will be the acid test of his leadership. He is halfway to redemption, but could still falter.

A mastery of terrain, they say, is the hallmark of the successful general as its equivalent, a keen eye for the dynamics of a campaign, is the hallmark of the successful candidate in the political arena. Aquino, in January, had predicted what has come to pass: that he would endure and be poised to achieve victory.

The Long View: Home stretch

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The Long View
Home stretch
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:38:00 04/14/2010

THE POINT OF DECISION IS APPROACHING, for individuals as well as the country. By all accounts, a larger percentage of the voting population has made up its mind compared to previous elections, but there remain both enough undecided voters and already-committed (but not steadfastly so) supporters to make the situation volatile still.

At the heart of the choice that voters and candidates have to make, is whether they will throw their lot with the veterans of the Marcos martial law machine, or gamble on reinvigorating the anti-Marcos coalition. Both, in a sense, are on their second and even third generations and with some interesting permutations: the most interesting one being President Macapagal-Arroyo, as she seeks to hold the balance of power not just going into election day, but beyond.

Undecided voters, for one, see the deadline for making their choices coming up fast, and as the political campaign reaches a crescendo, the sound and fury of the contest can lead even the committed to switch sides. Political candidates in the local races are also looking at firming up their affiliations, with the President’s patronage having held back some from switching sides until they can be sure every last peso promised them is released. Local candidates have to keep an eye on what they think will be the odds of being on the right or wrong side in terms of the national races, and voters’ opinions in their districts or provinces.

Whether national or local, logistics matters. It’s interesting that Joel Rocamora, a keen observer of political dynamics on the ground, puts forward the conventional wisdom that machinery can deliver 20 percent of the votes, though this is balanced, or hampered (depending on where you stand), by 80 percent of the votes being truly up for grabs. Buck the trend too much, and the machinery delivering on election day can actually be a problem if delivered to the losing side. An additional note is the Comelec reiterating the possibility that up to 30 percent of the voting may have to be done the old-fashioned way, with an almost-identical percentage having been bragged by the Frankenstein coalition as fully within its means to deliver to whoever it chooses to support.

Another estimate made by a formidable political operator in the government to my colleagues some time ago is equally interesting: the percentage of votes susceptible to manipulation, so to speak, is about 10 percent. What is unclear is if this is above and beyond the 20 percent conventionally believed to be within the power of political machines to deliver, or part of it. Whether this is even a modest or inflated estimate is unclear, but for the sake of argument let us assume this means that an administration machine can deliver anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of the vote, whether by wielding traditional logistics or more unusual methods. Since it is, perhaps, more prudent to assume the worst, then I don’t see any real deviation from what the operators say privately and what the Comelec and the ruling party have said publicly. Thirty percent of the popular vote, nationally speaking, is vulnerable.

Opportunity, however, doesn’t guarantee success. The long, detailed studies of the methods used by the administration to achieve its desired ends by hook or by crook in 2004 relied on various strategies all aimed at achieving the same goal. The first was to purge the precincts, as much as possible, of voters unfriendly to the administration. Disenfranchisement knocked off as many as 900,000 voters in the 2004 presidential polls. Then came the padding and shaving of votes, retaining the overall expected outcome in various areas while subtly changing the results, so that in the end, there was a net gain for the administration and a loss for the opposition. Only when these more subtle strategies failed did the President send in an emergency response team that was so crude “egged on by a frantic President” that it ended up exposed a year later.

It’d be well to remember that ultimately, the President’s trump card in responding to the ensuing crisis was a simple challenge purely Marcosian in its combination of crudeness and craft. The choice she offered was a simple one: Will you risk entering into unknown territory, constitutionally and politically speaking, or help maintain the fiction that the veneer of legality actually represents legitimacy? The risks were graphically represented by the armed might of the state being mobilized “and energetically exercised to ensure that every opportunity to prove public opinion stood foursquare against the President would fail to achieve its potential because of the message that this was one administration that was willing to spill blood, if necessary.

That underlying threat remains; the strategy remains as well. So even as organized political groups, whether national or local, obsess over how to get voters to the precincts and ensure the votes are counted as actually cast, the problem of the counting and the various scenarios raised by these problems complicate the decisions they have to make about who to support and to what extent, nationally-speaking, they are prepared to manifest that support or for how long.

This is where the court of public opinion competes with, and can potentially neutralize, the courts of law or whatever controlled forums the administration is trying to keep under its thumb. An election is a referendum that hinges on a single question: more of the same, or something different? Each voter has a sense of where the country stands on this question. Not that the actual result is a foregone conclusion, but rather, the possible outcomes, everybody knows, are limited and not infinite.

Postscript: After this column went to press, I attended a briefing in which Malou Tiquia of Publicus gave the following presentation, which she authorized me to share with readers of this blog. Incidentally, among her clients is presidential candidate Richard Gordon.

Philippine Daily Inquirer Briefing by Malou Tiquia

The Long View: The enemy of my enemy is my friend

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The Long View
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:59:00 04/11/2010

THE Liberals and Nacionalistas are now tangling over who gets to get the 6th copy of the election returns on Election Day. To be entitled to the copy requires Comelec designation as the dominant minority party – a kind of bureaucratic throwback to the two-party era. William Gatchalian of the Nationalist People’s Coalition summarizes the strategic advantages of the designation: “First, the [access to] election returns [ERs]” is the traditional advantage; but in addition, he says, “in the computerized system you also get your own server, so the flow of information [from Comelec to the party] is faster.”

But then why is Gatchalian of the NPC talking about the advantages of dominant minority party status, when it’s the NP that wants it? The NP and the NPC (itself an offshoot of the NP) say they’re coalesced and their coalition means they deserve the designation. Why the NP needs the NPC is best borne out by the statistic put out in a recent commentary by Joel Rocamora who is with the Aquino campaign: “The prevailing wisdom in this campaign is that Villar money has enabled him to build a bigger and better machinery than Aquino. The facts are opposite. The LP has 7,576 candidates down to municipal councilor to the NP’s 6,942; 136 congressional candidates to the NP’s 77; 37 gubernatorial candidates to the NP’s 26; 723 mayoral candidates to the NP’s 579. In an Aquino-Villar face off, Aquino is dominant in NCR, CAR and regions 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10 and 12. Villar is stronger only in regions 1, 5 and 11. There’s a tie (neither candidate has an advantage) in regions 2, 7 and 13.”

Now comes the NPC which says it has 2,375 candidates and so puts the NP over the top, vis-a-vis the LP, if you total their candidates. Manuel Roxas II points out, however, that there was a Comelec deadline for registering coalitions and the NP-NPC failed to meet the deadline; he also says the NPC top brass themselves haven’t publicly announced any merger or coalition with the NP. Nonetheless, it seems the LP will be brushed aside, and whether or not there’s really a coalition, the Comelec will say there is one and ergo, the NP and NPC get dominant minority party status. And if anybody doesn’t like it they can take it to court, all the way to the Supreme Court.

Where, incidentally, a case has been filed by the President’s lawyer, Romulo Macalintal Jr., to declare the Presidential Electoral Tribunal as it exists today unconstitutional. Basically his case argues the tribunal is an added function of the Supreme Court, but not a separate entity entitled to its own seal, rules, personnel, budget and so forth, because that would mean a violation of the prohibition on officials holding multiple offices. His case before the high court means it will be asked to decide whether it has been unconstitutionally using up public funds to decide presidential electoral protests; and even if that ethical question is sidestepped, it would only further shield the court from scrutiny if it decides that, yes, it decides such cases as it does all other cases before it.

What the Supreme Court “which according to a Sun-Star report has manned the tribunal since 1957 although rules were only promulgated in 2005″ and the Comelec have in common is that they are arguably still thinking along pre-martial law lines without having really imbibed the post-Edsa system. Ideally in a multiparty system, for example, the old distinctions between majority and minority are irrelevant and every party or coalition should be entitled to copies of election returns, whatever the logistical nightmare involved. Ideally the Supreme Court should be aware that what had merely been a precedent laid down after Garcia’s midnight appointments was enshrined in the Constitution itself in 1987 but obviously, that’s not the case: and even if Macalintal’s case is exotic in its argumentation, the blunt reality is, there’s an even chance the current Supremes might uphold it.

Where does this leave the Liberal and other parties, none of which enjoy the cozy relationship the NP or NPC has with the powers-that-be? They are left gearing up to fight blind on election day and thereafter. The Comelec claims results will be known locally, within a day or two; and nationally within two to three days or at most a week. The only antidote to fraud is to see returns trickling in, in real time, which is where servers come in; and protests high and low will require the forensic accounting that election returns make possible.

Instead, outside the chosen ranks of the Frankenstein coalition, and the NP-NPC, all the other national campaigns will have to trust the Comelec, which itself authorized only one watchdog from the citizenry – the docile and loveable PPCRV. Trust might be possible if the much-ballyhooed safeguards were in place. But again, having tried to sneak through multimillion-peso plastic folder purchases, the Comelec ended up less capable when it comes to security markings (no longer built into the machines, which foils the purpose of security markings and machine validation: it allows a switcheroo); allowing an independent review of the source code (none has taken place); or the Random Manual Audit, which it says will take place two weeks after elections, long after people have been proclaimed, and which is almost midway, for example, to the deadline for proclaiming a new president and vice president by June 30 at the latest, otherwise a constitutional crisis is triggered.

Is this the Mother of All Examples of Murphy’s Law, the administration maneuvering to expand its options by keeping all potentially pesky documents in friendly hands, giving it time to assess the results of election day, or or is it simply the puzzling situation of regulations being strictly applied to non-friendly forces by the government – while giving free passes to its friends or enemies of its enemies (and thus its friends)? You decide.

Postscript: The question of course is whether the NPC is acting as a party or whether what the Comelec has acted upon is an alliance between factions of the NPC and the leadership of the NP. A chart mappoing out where the various NPC party bigwigs stand is instructive, pointing to no cohesive, official, party stance. Another is a chart of areas where NPC and NP candidates are competing for the same position. On the other hand, this list of local candidates associated with the administration and also in alliance with the NP, is instructive.

News from unusual places

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The Long View
News from unusual places
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:33:00 04/07/2010

IN THE MUSICAL “CHICAGO,” Renee Zellwegger gets some tips from Richard Gere on how to charm the public with some razzmatazz and razzle-dazzle. Today, the final leg of the national campaign gets in gear and much of it will revolve around you, the viewer, as spectator: in particular, as a media consumer. Everyone is dying to know what you think, because what you think can make or break the candidates. And how do the pros claim to know how you think? By means of those regular snapshots of your opinion, known as the surveys.

And this points to a very human need: we want to know not only what’s happening, we all love to gaze into crystal balls. Is that what surveys are? At best they can only give us a snapshot: a frozen moment in time, based on a representative sample of the population. We take surveys all the time: we ask people what they think. In politics, it’s useful to know what a lot of people are thinking. This is public opinion, and our media have been trying to figure it out since 1933, when the Philippines Free Press pioneered mail-in questionnaires to its readers. The question: Do you support or reject the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Act? The mail-in survey reflected public opinion as it played out in elections that year: the public was overwhelmingly anti.

In 1938-39 as the proposals to amend the 1935 Constitution kicked off, the Philippines Free Press again engaged in mail-in surveys to ask its readers what they thought. At the time, the surveys showed support for a national Senate and for creating the Commission on Elections, but unease over changing the presidential term from six years to four years with reelection, the unattractive lady in this editorial cartoon. As a snapshot of public opinion, this proved useful to the advocates of amendments who managed to carry through the amendments by 1940.

Fast forward to the 1960s and public opinion polling had made quantum leaps in scope and methods. This was a time when the political landscape had already shifted from the old machines led by wrinkled old veterans. Instead, a more media-savvy, populist politics had taken root. It had been heralded by Ramon Magsaysay’s election in 1953 and the election of movie idol Rogelio de la Rosa to the Senate four years later, followed by his abortive but spectacular run for the presidency in 1961. In 1963, it seemed he’d make it to the Senate again.

That election year, as Nick Joaquin wrote in his article, “Ayos na ang Buto-Buto,“the polling firms became news for the reasons former Sen. Francisco Tatad objects to surveys today: they predicted who’d make it to the Senate and those tagged as losers screamed bloody murder. Not least because one survey firm got it badly wrong.

Still, public opinion polling has become part of the toolkit of modern governance. Going into the mid-term elections, President Fidel V. Ramos commissioned a survey with perhaps the biggest respondent base ever, many times over the usual samples used. It was a secret survey to take the public pulse on what were winning issues, and with the information from it, he propelled his party to a sweeping win.

More recently, presidential candidate Joseph Ejercito Estrada has shifted from pooh-poohing the surveys to chuckling that it’s better to start slow and go upwards as the campaign goes on. The fact of the matter is, the surveys matter to all the presidential candidates. Each survey that comes out from the reputable firms gives an insight into what is working and what’s failing in their campaign.

Even the administration, which publicly dismisses surveys because they reveal its unpopularity, has been an enthusiastic commissioner of surveys. It even had its own in-house survey supremo, once a top honcho in SWS.

The dramatic turns in other candidates’ fortunes can also be tracked in terms of whether the surveys show them moving upward or downward as the surveys take place month after month and week after week. The moment a survey comes out, political operators start planning how to react by means of the mass media.

Several years ago, the Institute of Philippine Culture of the Ateneo de Manila University already had focus groups with poor voters, which showed that for them, the media were already the top source of influence in voting decision.

The Manila Standard Today has been doing regular polling throughout the campaign period, and besides the candidates’ numbers, it asks many interesting questions. Let’s take a look at this question: What is the most helpful means in deciding whom to vote for?

Electorial Presentation.024

In terms of national elective positions, taken as a whole, they show mass media is king. Nearly half say it’s news on TV. Almost as many say it’s ads or commercials. A third, with 38 percent, say news that someone has visited one’s area. Ask yourself: Does this mean you saw the candidate, or heard that the candidate dropped by? And also, how did you hear about it? Chances are, from media. A third are influenced by debates and less than a quarter by news in the papers.

But the devil’s in the details as they say. If nearly half said they’re influenced by news in media on the candidates, what then, are the top sources of news? Electorial Presentation.025

About 83 percent say TV. Less than 10 percent say radio, only 2 percent say the papers.

But here’s the clincher. What then are the top trusted sources of news? Two out of three won’t surprise you: “TV Patrol,” and its rival, “24 Oras.” But the third top trusted source of news is “Wowowee.”

The question then becomes: Is one citizen’s definition of a news source very different from that of others? The figures can apply to radio, where Bombo Radyo and DZRH find themselves as trusted news sources together with Love Radio on FM; or to the broadsheets, where the Inquirer and Manila Bulletin are in the company of the tabloid Bulgar.

The Long View: Moving target

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The Long View
Moving target
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:52:00 04/04/2010

THE response of Presidential candidate Manuel Villar Jr. and friends to questions raised about some of his claims has been instructive, to say the least. The questions raised have been pretty straightforward. The first concerns the tragic loss of one of Villar’s brothers, who died as a small boy. Villar in his ads said his brother died because their family couldn’t afford medicines. A death certificate, on the other hand, revealed that the tragedy was due to complications arising from leukemia after the child’s admission to the FEU hospital. The mortuary services were provided by La Funeraria Paz. The second concerns Villar’s claims of poverty not just at the start, but throughout, his childhood and adolescence. After living in Tondo, the Villars (his father was a budget officer in the government and his mother was not a retail fish vendor but a wholesale dealer) moved to San Rafael Village in Navotas, where the family had a 560-square-meter property with a proper home. Lito Banayo has written most thoroughly on the proper context of all these lifestyle attributes circa the 1950s and 1960s: solidly bourgeois, in a word.

The third predates the first two and was only recently raised: To what extent is Villar’s pride in being a self-made man tarnished either by exaggeration or the outright use of official connections to give himself undue advantage?

Like I said, in terms of the recent questions (he maneuvered to dodge scrutiny on the older questions concerning his ethics as an official) his response has been extremely illuminating.

On March 30 on ANC’s “Dateline” program with Pia Hontiveros and Tony Velasquez, senatorial candidate and Nacionalista spokesman Gilbert Remulla said that the Villars were able to pay the hospital bills because Manuel Villar Sr. borrowed funds from an uncle. On the same day, in an ambush interview on “TV Patrol,” Villar himself said that his brother’s medical bills were paid for by means of a female cousin of his father, named Nelly Cruz, who lent them money. On March 31, in an 8:30 p.m. dzMM interview with Alvin Elchico and Lynda Jumilla, the story evolved further: Villar now said that his family brought his brother to FEU hospital because they had a relative who worked there as a nurse, and who could help them with discounts. Add to this Villar’s explanation that while his brother did get admitted to FEU, he was brought in as a charity ward patient.

This is an evolving response and might evolve some more this week. It brings to mind the style of Villar’s ally, Chavit Singson whose response to the story about his mistress’ lover being beaten up. When first asked about it, he brushed the story aside, saying “the guy’s lucky I didn’t have them killed.” The day after, he said he didn’t beat them up, but that he couldn’t stop others from assaulting the mistress and her lover. On the third day, by the time he came upon the scene, the two had already been assaulted, but not, mind you, by his bodyguards.

Fast forward to the GQ Magazine profile of Manny Pacquiao, “The Biggest Little Man in the World,” where Singson makes a characteristic cameo appearance. As Andrew Corsello colorfully recounted it, the gossip involving Singson, his mistress and her lover was “allegedly rectified” : [by Singson and cohorts] with (among other implements) a tiger whip.”

After recounting the “cheerful” response to the story of the mistress, her face “looking like lasagna,” making the papers, the writer then went on to repeat the following exchange with a “Team Pacquiao member [who] expressed surprise that the Governor hadn’t shown me the picture in his wallet.” Here’s the exchange from the article.

Picture of what, in Chavit’s wallet? “That guy’s dick.”

The American writer’s puzzled response: “What?”

The Filipino’s answer: “After the Governor’s guys had laid it on a table and whacked it with a hammer. It had to be surgically cut off after. Too mauled.”

Colorful, but hearsay, even though possibly read by tens of thousands. What isn’t hearsay, and only colorful in the sense of a family tragedy getting lurid, is the curious case of the circumstances surrounding the sad, sad story of Villar’s brother. The thing is, no one disputes certain things: that the Villars were visited by a great tragedy in losing a child so young; that Villar is a self-made man. But on the other hand, he made certain specific claims that are disputed by documents and the material circumstances of his own bio-data. It wasn’t enough to be thoroughly bourgeois, with solidly middle-class, respectable and, by all accounts, hard-working and capable parents. It wasn’t enough to marry into the Aguilar clan with its money and power: a typical (at first) middle class UP student who maximized the advantages his parents worked hard to provide him with.

It’s no surprise that the one most energetically taking Villar to task is Joseph Estrada, who came from gentry but who had an instinctive common touch. Estrada’s many shortcomings mattered little to the millions who know no secrets can really be hidden from one’s neighbors in the slums, where the intimate is public. So long as false piety – hypocrisy – is avoided, then it is better to be flawed but genuine than to be an artificial construct. Even if there’s an obvious element of roguery, even chicanery, in the Erap myth it’s all conducted with a wink and a sly grin – everyone’s in on the act.

Which makes the Villar schtick not just pretense but an outright fraud, and objectionable to those millions for whom money isn’t evil so long as gallantly dispensed without condescension. At the heart of Villar’s problems is his billions being unable to erase the insult he presents to the intelligence of the very voters he claims to have come from, and understands.