Meet the cowinners
This is the people’s verdict after the antigraft court’s guilty verdict on Estrada’s plunder case: Estrada and President Arroyo are cowinners. We just don’t know who, later on, will emerge as the bigger winner. But both won because this is how things are playing out.Estrada is now seen as a martyr. Not bad for somebody who squandered his towering political mandate and ruined himself while in office in pursuit of his hedonistic, baser urges.
The sentiment that Erap was a victim of political prosecution and not a crook is an across-the-board sentiment. Only the billionaires share the sentiment of the Arroyo hard-liners that Erap is a thieving buffoon who deserves a lifetime in jail. The verdict only enhanced the already awesome popularity of Estrada.
Estrada’s popularity will lead to two scenarios.
First, a premature presidential pardon just like what Vice-President Noli de Castro had suggested. Expect de Castro to take it up with the national leadership in the name of his new buzzword—reconciliation. The leadership is inclined to respond positively and urgently.
Before we know it, before the Estrada hardliners can even agitate people to take up to the streets to protest, Estrada might be out of Tanay, although with a minor inconvenience—the mark of a pardoned convict. But with our moral bar so low, who cares?
Even if this does not take place, Estrada can just sit back and relax in his Tanay rest house cum jail and wait for 2010. Sure as the sun rises in the morning, the presidential candidate who will win in 2010 will have to have Estrada’s backing. With Estrada’s mass base, a big 30 percent of the voting population, the candidate only needs to work on his or her own 20 percent to win.
The 30-percent solid Estrada voting bloc will be of greater significance if there are three or more candidates. Victory in the 2010 presidential election will be owed to Estrada.
In this context, the 2010 winner can pardon Estrada right after assuming power and this will be a popular (very) decision.
Those who doubt the political leverage and muscle that go with popularity should take it from Homer Simpson. Son, he told Bogart Simpson, “Popularity is the most important thing in the world.”
Especially to politicians.
What made Mrs. Arroyo a cowinner? Easy.
With Estrada in Tanay, she can go about with her business of governing without having to worry about having Estrada on the loose and physically proselytizing about injustice and corruption. The second-level leaders of the opposition do not have Estrada’s clout and popular appeal and they can’t stir the crowds as deeply and passionately as Estrada.
So she is safe in office. From his Tanay detention center, Estrada cannot manipulate the events in the country and sow the seeds of popular revolt. To be agitated and rebellious, the Estrada crowds need his physical presence.
She actually bought enough time to decide on what her course for the next two years or so would be: governing well or the guillotine.
If she governs well within the next two years or so and make amends for the many corrupt, bizarre and mediocre acts her administration has committed since 2001, she will be spared the guillotine. She will exit office, if not on a blaze of glory, on an appreciative note from the nation.
But if the rest of her term will be of the same deplorable stuff: ZTE, Jose Pidal, “Hello, Garci,” she will suffer a fate worse than a Tanay detention.
The choice is hers. She has time on her side. She can still reverse what is looming to be a cruel verdict of history.
The verdict was a temporary hump for Estrada. It also gave Mrs. Arroyo enough time to make amends for her past indiscretions and work for an acceptable closure to her mistrusted presidency.
The nation, in some weird sense, is a bit of a winner. It got its break, a relief from a head-on clash between two contending political forces (both lusting for power) which our prostrate and polarized people do not even deserve.
With our national expectations so low, with our national mood so downcast, that can be considered a win.
