Why change it? It’s working
In a recent video-streamed forum, the panelists were hard put trying to explain the Duterte phenomenon.
Here is a President who curses, cracks all sorts of vulgar jokes, acts beyond generally accepted social norms and yet gets away with it. Instead of being jeered as un-presidential, he is applauded and cheered by his audience.
According to both SWS and Pulse Asia, he has enjoyed the highest trust and acceptance ratings compared to his predecessors. Surprisingly, his popularity even cuts across classes and even across the world.
No doubt, he has his fair share of detractors--from the academe, the religious, mainstream media, political opponents. But against them, Duterte has a solid core of 16 million Dutertards.
To what can we attribute this phenomenon? Charisma? Ability to connect with his crowd? Ability to evoke an emotional response?
He has succeeded in projecting himself as a probinsiyano mayor with no pretensions. He readily admits his ignorance of economics. The reason, he says, why he leaves his economic managers pretty much alone.
But he can also project himself as a strong and decisive leader. His posture of defiance against superpowers and his handling of Marawi are cases in point.
Over two decades as a “kanto boy”-type mayor, he has developed a flair for drama. Just take a look at how he ordered the destruction of several confiscated luxury cars with a back hoe. Not to forget the firing of an appointee for going on foreign trips once too many.
And thanks to his handlers too, he has come up with a strong narrative (supporting the police and the military come hell or high water, caring for the OFW), which he delights in personally repeating.
It also helps that he has retained a troll army whose main job is to magnify and re-echo his messages. Never mind if the truth is often stretched in the process.
The result is a very powerful, larger-than-life Duterte who can challenge and has, in fact, succeeded in disrupting the status quo.
The establishment probably had it coming. In so many ways, it has not lived up to the expectation of the average Filipino. The justice and criminal system, for example, works sooooo slowly. It is no surprise therefore to find the average Filipino welcoming legal shortcuts and the return of the death penalty and lapping up Duterte’s rhetoric.
In a recent chance encounter with Finance Secretary Sonny Dominguez, I congratulated him for the recent passage of Train, which will fund this administration’s “Build, Build, Build” program.
But I also shared with him my personal concerns about the President’s leadership style. Our next generation must have a good role model, I told Sonny.
Sonny just smiled: Why change it? It’s working!