Arroyo's Folly

Arroyo’s folly

Updated 09:33pm (Mla time) Sept 04, 2004
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the September 5, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


IT wasn’t only her family that went on vacation last week; President Macapagal-Arroyo’s sense of proportion also went on holiday. Her decision to bring her extended family -- her second son, her two daughters-in-law, and her grandchildren and their nannies -- on her state visit to China would have been eyebrow-raising in the best of times. But in the middle of a fiscal crisis? The decision was a terrible mistake.

We have no doubt that the non-official members of the President’s delegation to China paid their own way. Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye defended Ms Arroyo’s decision precisely on that ground. But the issue is not whether government money was used. It is whether Ms Arroyo has set the right example.

The issue is whether, as the leader of a country facing fiscal difficulties, the President believes the spirit of self-sacrifice she has invoked -- and which she said the country needs -- applies to her and her family as well.

From her, the answer, apparently, is No.

The decision cast a shadow over the China visit, the President’s second since 2001. “Right now we have forgotten the benefits of the agreements that the President would bring back from her trip,” Bunye said plaintively on Friday.

Now whose fault is that? By allowing almost her entire family to tag along, the President herself invited the inevitable criticism. But in a bizarre turn, Bunye all but blamed the media for writing about the “Arroyo family vacation.”

“Our appeal is don’t make the issue any bigger and instead focus on the positive results of the President’s visit,” he said. To be sure, there are any number of positive results, beginning with the state visit itself, a sign of both better bilateral relations and China’s increasingly important role on the global stage. But if the positive is overshadowed by the negative, Bunye’s boss is the one to blame.

Thus, simply on the level of the politics of state visits, the President’s decision was a mistake. It distracted public attention, it undercut the administration’s own economic and foreign-policy objectives, it cluttered the message.

On the level of crisis politics, however, the decision was an even bigger, worse mistake. It needlessly undermined the President’s moral authority to call for greater self-sacrifice. Beyond the public clamor for the reduction or the outright abolition of the pork barrel, beyond the flurry of citizens’ donations to the so-called Bayanihan Fund, beyond the President’s own call for austerity in government, the most important anti-crisis measure waits: new taxes.

These require the President’s savvy use of her political capital, which includes popular support, or at least the lack of organized public resistance. But the “Arroyo family vacation” in China makes public support for unpopular reforms even more difficult.

Arroyo’s rhetoric

IN HER State of the Nation Address last July, President Macapagal-Arroyo mustered the clichés of self-sacrifice one more time, as she called on all Filipinos to bear the “tough decisions” that needed to be made.

“It must be tougher on those who’ve had it easy than on those who’ve had it tough already.” And again: “We must bear the pain and share the pain to enjoy the gain together.” And yet again: “Those with more must sacrifice more; those with less are already living lives of self-sacrifice.”

Now that a fiscal crisis is upon us, one would think that the President’s appeal to self-sacrifice has become even more necessary (although we hope she does better than call the roll of tired and tiresome phrases another time). But what the President did does not square with what the President said.

Austerity begins at home.