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A few weeks back, Mrs. Arroyo was in a playful mood. Today, she is
truly in high spirits. Even at the Palace, there are hardly signs it
was like a war zone early March. The corridors now reverberate with
brisk but confident steps.
Even the Cabinet members who wanted to desert
her in March are unashamedly clinging on to their posts now. And
worried sick about their body language a few months back, when the
presidency was on the line and Jun Lozada was the most popular
Filipino.
You don’t need to be Gallup or Pew to
competently track the mood swings of Mrs. Arroyo and the level of
confidence at the presidential palace. Just read the headlines and
you will have a general idea on the whys and the wherefores of Her
Excellency’s mood swings.
The initial gust of relief, tentative maybe but
relief nonetheless, came on the day the stories on the global food
crisis pushed the ZTE stories and the campus visits of Jun Lozada
below the fold. More, more, more, the Palace prayed. Lo and behold,
these stories came in torrents.
Food riots in Haiti. Rice prices topping the
$500 per metric ton mark. Food summits everywhere. The sense of
desperation across the globe. The unwarranted attacks on biofuels.
Finally, the news that rice tenders have gone overboard, madly
soaring beyond $800 per metric ton.
Even the heart-rending footage of poor Filipinos
queuing for cheaper NFA rice were balm to the worried soul of the
Palace residents.
Grave concerns definitely. But their net effect
was to push the ZTE corruption stories and the then-snowballing
Gloria Resign campaign out of the public consciousness. And for a
president more interested in being president than being recorded in
history as a great president, that was enough.
The truly high spirit, Gloria in Excelsis, came
after the food crisis lingered on the headlines, splitting the news
prominence with an issue, which clearly came from the drawing boards
of the Palace wag-the-dog people. This was the issue of power, not
the power Lord Acton lumped with corruption, but electricity.
Electricity cost is a win-win issue for her.
Right now, she and her lackeys are still struggling to lead the
headlines toward her chosen villain, Meralco, but her operatives are
confident of two scenarios. Either they can savage Meralco or
unnerve the powerful Lopezes, while conveying the message that she
truly cares about lower electric cost.
Two-thirds of Filipinos want Mrs. Arroyo to go,
to vanish from our lives and turn over power to a worthy new
president. The desperate enough said they could live with a ruling
junta. But let us all admit this: her crisis is over and she will be
staying through 2010.
The opposition, meanwhile, is in a state of
disarray, totally perplexed by the dramatic swing in the political
fortunes of Mrs. Arroyo. A few months ago, she was considered a
goner, with many in her Cabinet preparing their exit strategies.
Today, she is back to her favorite role of empress dominatrix.
Mrs. Arroyo’s triumphal resurrection was
clearly missed by the armchair analysts and much of the punditry
which, by the way, have misread major political events and their
meanings with depressing frequency.
They said that rice queues will force Mrs.
Arroyo out, the rice lines and the food crisis will trigger a
rebellious bent shown in EDSA Uno and EDSA Dos. They do not know
their countrymen that deep and that much.
Food crises indeed fray the nerves of Filipinos
and essentially test their patience. But they do not blame the
government for it. They connect with the government throughout such
crises. The most brutalized ones even see the government as a savior
during these times.
What did we see as the reaction from poor
Filipinos who had just gone through the rice queues, their sweating,
callused hands clutching two kilos of cheap NFA rice? Relief, not
anger.
The scary ZTE and Jun Lozada headlines had come
to pass. So was the political storm that gathered with the
headlines.
mvrong@yahoo.com
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