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Friday, March 29, 2024

A different audience

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If you still don’t get it, maybe that’s your problem. Perhaps the President has never really spoken to you, like he does nearly all the time to most Filipinos.

President Rodrigo Duterte took more than two hours to deliver his second State of the Nation Address, his first full-year report to the Filipino people. It was a rambling, town hall-inspired speech given by someone who still considers himself a mayor, more worthy of a screed given during a weekly flag-raising ceremony at Davao City Hall than a statesmanlike address before both Houses of Congress, the diplomatic corps and various national-level high-and-mighties.

It was full of the ad-libbing, the expletives, the self-deprecating asides and all the other things that make a Duterte speech, well, a Duterte speech. (And it did contain a prepared text, which the President read like he was being forced to do so, perhaps because he did not want to hurt the feelings of the speechwriter.)

But it worked. And that’s the man’s genius.

And it worked because Duterte talks to the people instead of at them. He hits all the notes that matter to people and they respond to him like they did to no other who took the reins of power.

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In a column yesterday, the Times’ Rigoberto Tiglao explained the attraction of Filipinos to Duterte in terms of bravery. Duterte’s audacity and willingness to fight—against oligarchs, the media, the Catholic Church the United States, among many others—has demonstrated “in just a year in office… [bravery] that we admire in leaders” as diverse as Winston Churchill, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Ramon Magsaysay.

In another opinion piece, and from a very different political perspective, University of the Philippines sociologist Randy David suggested in the Inquirer that what Duterte lucked into was an “angry nation” that could no longer take the status quo. “Duterte has accidentally tapped into a deep well of anger against a dysfunctional social order—a system in which ordinary Filipinos could find no hope; with an angry president at the helm, Filipinos have stumbled into the age of resentment, expecting it will lead to change.”

Tiglao correctly observed the attractiveness of Duterte’s bravery, while David’s taking note of the people’s anger was spot on. But I would rather focus on how Duterte is appealing because he is his own best communicator, because of how he unerringly speaks to the people who elected him to office a year ago—and who have only increased incredibly in number as his term runs its course.

I think the elites’ problem with Duterte is rooted in their basic failure to comprehend what the President is trying to say. That’s because Duterte pointedly refuses to speak to the elites, choosing instead to talk to the ordinary people who would understand him perfectly well when he talks about things like fighting illegal drugs, the refusal of the Communists to talk real peace or the oligarchies that have made so much money while not giving enough to the poor by paying the right taxes.

Duterte’s audience is not the people who assembled in front of him at the Batasang Pambansa yesterday. And those watching outside the House who tried to read deeply into what the President said were reminded, as well, that this is not a president who will speak to them through hints and allusions—what he says is so blunt, transparent and obvious that it eliminates the need for exegesis.

Duterte speaks to the people directly and effectively, in a trilingual argot that they understand. And that is why he is, empathically, the best communicator that his administration can ever have for the great majority of the Filipino people.

If you still don’t understand Duterte, don’t fret. The people who matter to Duterte—and to whom Duterte matters—have never had that problem.

* * *

Here I must mention that the man Duterte replaced as president, Noynoy Aquino, whom nobody except the elites really understood, gave one of the most incomprehensible reasons for not being president yesterday at the Batasan. Aquino said he wanted to watch Duterte’s Sonas on television, because then he would not be distracted by people trying to whisper things in his ear.

I wonder why Aquino believed that the people whom he would be sitting with in the session hall—all of them former presidents like himself—would be whispering to him. Surely Fidel Ramos, Joseph Estrada and Gloria Arroyo would not be as rude as to be caught whispering to anyone during the speech of the man who now holds the highest post in the land; and even if they did, I don’t think they’d have anything to tell Aquino.

No, Aquino just cannot handle being in the same room with those former presidents ­—especially Arroyo, whom he sent to jail for five years. And I suspect that he cannot bear the thought of the people he fattened with pork barrel funds and through his Disbursement Acceleration Program who are still in Congress no longer fawning upon him and maybe even ignoring him.

What Aquino is really scared of, I think, is that no one will even attempt to whisper to him at all. And Aquino would rather break the tradition of all former presidents attending the incumbent’s biggest annual speech because he is convinced, as I am, that he is no longer important or even relevant.

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