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Featured Stories

PEOPLE POWER
The Paradox of Freedom: People Power in the Information Age
by David Celdran
When public space migrates to the airwaves and the news pages, politics risks degenerating into a spectator sport.

ELECTIONS 2004
Lanao’s Dirty Secrets
by Sheila S. Coronel
What really happened in Lanao del Sur in 2004 that prompted the attempts to silence Brig. Gen. Gudani?

10 Reasons to Doubt the 2004 Election Results
by Yvonne T. Chua and Avigail M. Olarte
The numbers don’t alays add up, and that’s just one reason why last year’s elections are so controversial.

THE FUTURE OF ELECTIONS
Can Comelec Reform?
by Alecks P. Pabico
Despite being hounded by controversy, the elections body is resisting change.

REFORMS IN THE BARRACKS
The Officers Who Say No
by Luz Rimban
Military and police officers believe reforming the system begins with reforming the individual.

JOURNALIST AT RISK
Reporting under the Gun
by Vinia M. Datinguinoo
Mei Magsino escaped the wrath of the alleged jueteng lord who is also Batangas governor.

THE METROPOLIS
Battle of the Billboards
by Charlene Dy
They’re big, bold, and not quite beautiful. They can also be a health and environmental hazard, but so far, no one is policing billboards.

WOMEN AND DISASTER
Resilience Amid Ruin
by Tess Bacalla
Many more women than men died in the Aceh tsunami. Today the women survivors wrestle with disaster relief programs that don’t consider special needs.

YOUTH VOLUNTEERS
A Gift of Self
Young people discover life’s meaning by doing volunteer work.

SPECIAL ON PINOY POLITICAL HUMOR
Impersonating Presidents
by Elvira Mata
This is a coutnry where there's always someone spoofing a president — dead or alive — on TV, during cocnerts, and from time to time, at people power marches. Five actors top the list of the country's best impersonators.

La Vida Doble
by Tony Velazquez
Because Philippine politics is so ridiculous, amateur impersonators are having a feast.

Mobile Clowning
by Sheila S. Coronel
The cellphone has only encouraged the Pinoy propensity for jokes.

Where Has All the Laughter Gone?
by Katrina Stuart Santiago
Websites and blogs have provided an outlet for political humor, but not all of them are funny.

When public space migrates to the airwaves and the news pages, politics risks degenerating into a spectator sport.

by DAVID CELDRAN

	THE END OF PEOPLE POWER? Anti-Arroyo protests have not quite reached people-power scale, unlike the movements against Estrada (below, left) and Marcos (below, right).

IT WAS the perfect formula for another uprising. Factors and forces that conspired to oust a previous president surfaced again to threaten yet another one out of power: a familiar pattern of titillating scandal and media overkill; congressional investigation and official cover-up; street protests and digital demonstrations.

The opposition Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo faces today is fiercer and far more determined to oust her than that which forced Joseph Estrada out of the Palace in 2001. Led by former President Cory Aquino and actress Susan Roces, two of the country's most popular widows and compelling political leaders, it is an opposition that includes one of the broadest, if not the most unlikely, spectrum of activists assembled in recent years.

Media coverage is likewise unprecedented. Twenty-four-hour news and live broadcasts have taken every whistleblower's account (and private intrigues) to living rooms and offices everywhere. Anti-Arroyo blogging, until recently a fringe activity for political junkies with too much time on their hands, has now exploded into the mainstream. So have ring tones, jokes, and gossip circulating via text.

Like a virus contaminating everything from online chat rooms, office conversations, news broadcasts, showbiz talk shows, and text messages, there is no escaping "Gloriagate." The damage to the president, as independent polling figures indicate, seems irreversible. If People Power had a script, then this would be it.

Pundits predicted it was just going to be a matter of time before Edsa 4 erupted. All that was left was for people to spill out into the streets. Many did, but not in numbers that sent previous presidents packing. In the week that followed Cory Aquino's surprise televised appeal for President Arroyo to resign, about 30,000 to 40,000 protesters converged on Makati's Ayala Avenue-the best effort so far since the crisis erupted. Organizers promised more, but the rallies on the days leading up to and immediately after the impeachment complaint was killed in Congress failed to meet expectations. Where was People Power, or at least the kind that showed up in past Edsa uprisings?

That's what the opposition, the administration, and the media, who had already laid out its coverage plans for a fourth Edsa, were left asking. There was and continues to be no shortage of answers. Organizers within the anti-Arroyo opposition blame it on the lack of centralized leadership — and on mutual distrust. With a coalition as diverse in its representation as in its alternatives to President Arroyo, observers predicted that divisions within the movement would begin to affect the ability to communicate a coherent message and project a credible image to the public.

From the onset, the presence of personalities affiliated with Ferdinand Marcos and Joseph Estrada in the coalition, both of whom were ousted by previous Edsa uprisings, created discomfort among People Power veterans. Those who had experienced the various Edsa uprisings, if only vicariously through news coverage, were just as perplexed — even outraged — by the odd coalition of former-enemies-now-bedfellows in the campaign to oust GMA.

There were attempts to correct this public-relations confusion by giving the anti-Arroyo movement a more prominent middle-class, or put more accurately, a friendlier "middle-force" character. But repackaging the coalition proved difficult. In the age of information, hardly anything can still be concealed from the public. Whatever the camera lens cannot expose is left over for the commentariat to scrutinize. Few secrets survive when the media's attention is on overdrive.

Previous Edsa revolts may have shared the same organizational limitations. But the lack of a central command, and a more defined, and therefore sustainable, organizational structure was less of a problem then since the uprisings unfolded so quickly. Ousting a president, unlike transforming society, requires less preparation. Organizational unity and ideological purity are not as critical-unless when waging protracted warfare. Nevertheless, the failure of organization remains a popular explanation for the absence of People Power in 2005. It is, however, far from being the only reason. Neither is it the most compelling.

POLITICS OF SCANDAL
Gauging the public mood is often very tricky. Get it wrong and you either underestimate or overestimate how far people will go to express their outrage, if any at all. Surveys do provide clues to the pulse of people, but they cannot predict the often- spontaneous reactions to unfolding political events. Polls, if they are to be of any scientific use, should also be analyzed in the context of historical data. The overwhelmingly negative opinion of the president after the Senate investigations on illegal gambling, the release of the "Hello Garci" tapes to the media, and Arroyo's public apology, follows a downward trajectory in presidential popularity after the 2004 elections. A look at postelection surveys already showed a majority dissatisfied with the administration, most even concluding fraud in the polls. While "Gloriagate" has pushed the president's ratings to historic lows, Arroyo's slide cannot be compared with the dramatic plunge Joseph Estrada took after the series of scandals exposed his undeclared wealth. If Erap's ratings took a free fall, Arroyo's numbers are slipping from previously low expectations of her leadership and prior questions about her political legitimacy.

Not that the public isn't outraged by the allegations of presidential malfeasance; only that they may have, after a previous term marked by investigations on her husband, already conditioned themselves to expect more scandals ahead.

No coincidence perhaps that Arroyo anchored her election campaign on the less-than-inspiring themes of pragmatism and continuity. Notably, though, Raul Roco, Eddie Villanueva, Panfilo Lacson and Fernando Poe, Jr. promised to bring moral leadership to Malacañang as a way to differentiate themselves from the incumbent.

Presidential allies like to argue that the oust-Arroyo campaign is only round two of last year's elections. That may be a shallow and self-serving analogy, but a quick look at the warm bodies occupying the street protests shows a who's who of political partisans who campaigned for the president's opponents. And like last year's elections, the administration is once again selling to its core constituency the continuity of an Arroyo presidency over the risky alternative of a transition government or military-civilian junta.

Fear of the unknown might be keeping People Power locked safely at home, but so too is fatigue. You hear it all the time on radio and television call-in programs: people are tired of politics. Not too tired to watch their politicians outdo the soaps on television, mind you, but too overwhelmed nonetheless by the political mudslinging that threatens to get anyone involved dirtied in the process.

In this political free-for-all, take-no-prisoners brawl, no one is spared. Not the pious Cory, or the ever so proper Susan. Not even the Catholic bishops have managed to escape the public's skepticism. Retired generals, civil-society leaders, even B-list actors-everyone is considered a plotter or a has-been mounting a comeback. Distrust for public figures has reached alarming levels so much that people now find it hard to make out the crusaders from the carpetbaggers, the journalists from the spin doctors, the well-meaning from the just plain mean.

When the citizens' trust in institutions, in leaders, and ultimately in themselves erodes, a climate of political nihilism takes over and people begin to withdraw from civic life and give up on political action altogether. This is the end of innocence — the rude awakening to a world the way politicians see it: a politics without the illusions of greatness and heroics. It is shades of grey all over and murky definitions of the public good. This is the moral relativism abhorred by both idealists and conservatives everywhere. But after a history of revolutions with disappointing results, Filipinos have learned to adjust and adapt.

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