Lame duck

A few months ahead of the normal course of things, President Aquino has clearly descended into lame duck status. That is the larger consequence of the Mamasapano incident.

The latest available tracking poll, taken during the first week of this month, shows the majority of our public pinning the blame for the bloody fiasco on Aquino and his best friend Alan Purisima. That majority should have enlarged the past week as the Senate hearing nailed responsibility firmly on the part of the President.

In addition, over the weekend, respected Cardinal Ricardo Vidal, along with several other senior bishops and leaders of other faith groups issued a resounding call for the President to resign his post. The resignation call will likely resonate the next few days as groups critical of the way the country has been governed gear up for protest actions coinciding with the anniversary of the Edsa Revolution.

The fallout from the Mamasapano incident is profound, regardless of how things are appreciated at the Palace.

Not since the 1983-86 period and the Erap impeachment episode has the atmosphere become so intensely politicized. Social media facilitates the consolidation of public sentiment. People from show business and sports and other normally apolitical spheres of our national life have taken courageous positions condemning Aquino for sheer incompetence.

I have talked to a wide range of people since Mamasapano happened. These are people who do not usually take strident political positions and normally postpone judgment with much generosity. Many of them now think Aquino should go.

The final assessment of this administration is being forged as we speak. The historical verdict is now being written.

All the bungling that happened, all the boastful pronouncements we took as comic relief and all the petty quirks that displaced proper policy are now being recalled and placed in the context of ineptitude.

This early, the Aquino administration is being declared an utter failure, a waste of opportunity, a regime of hot air and little substance. When such opinions settle, they will be hard to dispel. Aquino has little time left to reinvent himself and reincarnate the leadership he might be capable of providing.

Whether he leaves office now or at the constitutionally appointed time, he has very little political capital left in his chest to do much to recast the misfortune of a legacy he will leave behind. He has not assembled around him men of imagination and extraordinary skill to turn a negative tide.

Around him are small men who thrive in backbiting, not in statesmanship. Surrounding him are cronies who value his favor rather their own achievement.

He is swamped in the outrage that spills into all the avenues of public conversation. He does not have the personal gifts that will enable him to rise above the adversity, or even stand above the fray.

When the going gets tough, he has a tendency to retreat to a metaphorical or actual inner chamber, to get away from it all or simply to seek salvation in denial.

Right now, some of the most acute observers detect in Aquino a broken man, a dispirited leader. A broken man cannot make his presidency whole again.

Mishandled

Mamasapano is not Aquino’s Waterloo. He had won no glorious battles before this defeat.

Mamasapano is simply Aquino’s unmasking. It is the sum of his undoing.

For over four years, Aquino ran roughshod over all our institutions. Personal ties were always more important than professional accountabilities. The people he liked, he exempted from the rules. Then he broke the rules to break the people he disliked — including bribing whole institutions with abundant pork.

He discharged his office less like a modern chief executive and more like a traditional oriental despot. He surrounded himself with a cordon sanitaire that filtered out the bad news and magnified the things that might flatter him. On Jan. 25, in Zamboanga, all the perils of such an arrangement came home to roost.

Aquino operated according to personal whim. He took things at his own time and held little respect for the dictates of larger circumstances. He once scandalized a regional summit when he made Ricky Carandang stand in his place in the leaders’ final photo-op. When he did not feel like making an appearance at Villamor and welcome home his own dead soldiers, he simply skipped the event. The fallout from that he still reaps.

Because Purisima was his friend and Espina was not, he allowed a big and risky operation to continue without observing the proper chain of command. Personality-oriented management always risks calamity.

 The immediate aftermath of the Mamasapano incident was completely mishandled.

It took nearly four days for the President to materialize and speak to the nation. The scent of a cover-up will always attend such an inexplicable delay.

In the two televised addresses to the nation Aquino scrambled to deliver, he fudged rather than clarified. He provoked more questions than what he imagined were acceptable answers.

He fueled the fire rather than doused it. He fabricated the trap into which he eventually fell.

All the inquiries that followed those two pathetic speeches focused on only one thing: unveiling the extent of Aquino’s responsibility for the fiasco. 

The medium is the message. The truth we wish to unearth is the truth Aquino tries to conceal from us.

All the inquiries implicitly tell our people: Your leader lied to you.

Henceforth, Aquino’s ability to dictate the flow of things will diminish by the day. He will quickly retreat into the irrelevant background of things, quacking like an unwanted duck.

A lame duck.