Groupthink

They all performed according to a badly written script: Annabel Rama, Francisco Tatad, Alfredo Lim, Jejomar Binay and, yes, Fernando Poe Jr.

The rage was contrived. The gestures were well practiced. And the facts were, well, missing.

Like soufflé badly executed, the result fell flat. The act clashed with the atmosphere. The context did not agree with the spiels. They were a hard rock band in a properly appointed concert hall.

So detached from the general public’s appreciation of events was their scripted version of it, they sounded surreal. Here were hucksters of political pornography trying vainly to get a placid population excited.

Poe’s press conference last Tuesday was particularly funny.

During his miting de avance speech Saturday night, Poe nearly gave his senatorial slate a collective heart attack when he faltered for a moment, seemingly forgetting a transition line in his memorized speech. In his press conference Tuesday afternoon, Poe rushed in and delivered his 3-minute memorized speech, knitted brow and all. Then, with all awkwardness, he excused himself abruptly and rushed out of the room, clearly in avoidance of unexpected questions and pleas for more detail from the press.

It was like he had a particularly severe attack of diarrhea and needed to be atop the closest toilet bowl in two seconds flat.

That highly contrived hurriedness completely undermined the purpose of that press conference: to convince the public that the elections were fatally flawed and that Poe’s victory was stolen from him.

From that moment on, everything unraveled.

Poe’s inner circle of associates descended to their usual level of incompetence. The second layer of his cordon sanitaire, composed of some of the most hare-brained showbiz personalities, provided an incredible, hysterical face to this agitation effort.

The actor is surrounded by people whose hubris will cause them to suffer a long period of denial before they accept political fact. It is a period of denial that will be unduly lengthened because they talk only among themselves, reinforce each other’s biases, and stoke each other’s anger. It is a gang perilously prone to groupthink.

It might bring them some relief to try and talk to other people, to those better adjusted to normalcy.

Sometime during the middle of the campaign, when President Gloria and Poe were locked in dead heat in the surveys, one of Poe’s supporters boasted over dinner that a revolution would happen if his idol does not win. Revealing his own doubt over the political competence of his colleagues, however, he allowed himself to say that if the uprising did not happen three days after elections, he would immediately fly to the US and never return.

I wish him a pleasant flight.

For all intents and purposes, the moment for riotous undertakings has passed. There was, to begin with, no climate hospitable to the malevolent designs of those who wanted a riot to happen.

With all its warts and vulnerabilities, our electoral process held through. People, including those who could not find themselves on the voters’ lists, held the exercise to be generally orderly and fair. A few counting stations have been stormed by irate voters, but these were all about local candidates and neighborhood rivalries.

As far as the national elections were concerned, the public concluded that the process was conducted fairly, discounting the normal imperfections we are all familiar with.

There is no climate of outrage in the streets. All the outrage we have seen so far emanates from funny characters emerging from Poe’s headquarters.

Amay Bisaya is no Leon Trotsky. Annabel Rama is no Gabriela Silang. Rex Cortez is no Che Guevarra. And Fred Lim is no Nelson Mandela – although he might approximate the latter’s age.

Together, they will not produce a revolution.

The more inflammatory their utterance, the funnier they become. That is the tragedy of the Poe cabal. But it is a tragedy only for those who have ill designs for our democracy; it is pure entertainment for most of us.

There are limits to the circus we call elections in this country. Those limits are reached when the population decides that we’ve had enough of the fun and the time has come to get back to work.

In this particular case, the limit is likely demarcated by the release of the SWS exit poll Tuesday evening, just as the most rabid of Poe’s lieutenants were beginning to raise a tsinelas army of rebellion on Ayala Avenue. That was one of the fortunate coincidences that helped us avert this elections becoming a perilous exercise.

Most of the population snapped out of electoral mode the moment the results of the exit poll were announced. Never mind if the Namfrel count was bogged down. Never mind if the KNP was quoting some strange survey outfit with very different results from the norm.

The exit poll was treated by most of our people as the virtual count. The elections are over. It was fair. We have a winner.

Above all, there are no surprises. What people expected would happen happened. There is little public appetite for turbulence and uncertainty.

Our electoral democracy, with all its faults, survived yet another test. But that should not be an excuse to continue postponing its modernization.

There will be no dramatic changes in policy in the foreseeable future. The markets will welcome that. Our economy should regain its dynamism in due time.

There are those who contest elections because of ideological inspiration. There are those who do so because they abide by a program of government that they hold to be beneficial to our people. And then there are those who engage in elections merely because sheer popularity provided a window for winning.

Poe’s cabal belongs to the latter category. And seeing that window close as the numbers come in, they could not resist aggravating the parody of our politics that they represent.