EDITORIAL - All the president’s men

There was a time, right at the very beginning of President Duterte’s term, when his critics tried to make an issue of his surrounding himself with appointees from San Beda, his alma mater, and from Mindanao, where his heart belongs. On hindsight now, this is turning out to be quite propitious and his critics may as well thank him for doing so.

Duterte is an impulsive man, quick to the draw, even quicker with his tongue. He has said things that are a nightmare to his image handlers, and even worse to the guardians of our foreign relations. Whether he means many of what he says is less of a problem than his having said them in the first place even if he never meant anything by them at all.

But thanks to the people he has chosen to surround himself with, classmates, fraternity brothers, and boyhood friends with whom he has shared a large part of his life and therefore people he can trust, no presidency ever had a more dependable clean-up crew than the one he currently has. Whenever Duterte spills something, his inner circle closes in and clears up the mess.

In case you have not noticed, anybody in his inner circle appears free to make his own clarification to anything Duterte says that needs to be clarified. If Duterte describes something as a square, someone from that inner circle will come forward to explain he really meant a circle. And Duterte will leave it at that. He will not contradict his friend. In fact he leaves things at that.

What this means is that Duterte himself knows he has a fast mouth and that he can talk out of turn. But still he goes on, refusing to rein himself in, perhaps realizing he is too old to learn new tricks. More importantly, he knows that his circle of friends get it, that they know what he really means when he says something, especially when he says something bad.

Other leaders, especially those as tough as Duterte or even tougher, would probably not countenance having to be explained away by underlings, or worse, to be contradicted before the public. But the fact that Duterte allows the corrections could mean that he has acknowledged the corrections as what he truly wanted to convey. It may be a complicated arrangement. But once you get the hang of it, you will appreciate that it works for everybody.