Told you so

Great expectations indeed. You can almost hear the big sigh as the Inquirer.net editor wrote the title of his latest piece. With the sort of perspective we enjoy (or, more appropriately, suffer from) today as a result of the bungled hostage crisis that resulted in the deaths of eight foreign tourists last week, it becomes clearer now in retrospect how Filipinos became the victims of the clever sales pitches and sloganeering in the campaign of President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III in this year's presidential election. So evident now are the false expectations this moronic campaign created that even the Inquirer.net Editor himself cited them...

We thought things would change. But nothing has, strictly speaking. It’s one thing to believe in a leader and protect your right to vote that leader into office. It’s a whole other thing to expect your chosen messiah to become a literal savior, someone who can change things with a wave of his hand, with a crinkle on his brow.

It is easy to jump to the conclusion that the expectations were too high for P-Noy. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the expectations were wrong. We all expected it would be easy, that P-Noy would take care of it.

Indeed P-Noy would take care of it. And the "kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap ("no corruption, no poverty") slogan that defined his campaign was the underlying philosophy that was to guide this effort to enrich the impoverished.

Unfortunately, as we are seeing today, what impoverishes the Filipino is something that is bigger than corruption (and I have always asserted that corruption is but a mere symptom of some underlying Filipino condition from which our chronic imporverishment ultimately originates). And, sure enough, we find ourselves even more impoverished (in many aspects and not just financially) now as a people after our collective ineptitude has resulted in the deaths of eight foreign guests. It is not exactly the sort of imporverishment that can be explained by Noynoy's campaign slogan now, is it?

So yes, Mr Editor, it was easy for the Average Pinoy Schmoe to expect a lot from Noynoy -- easy for him to lap up all his "promises" with glee. It is because these "promises" were packaged in colourful yellow boxes slapped with comics-style call-out balloons filled with platitudes meant to demonise previous administrations. Eye-candy served with a side dish of mongered fear (the staple of the tabloid-reading classes), is a sure-fire blockbuster hit.

After the packaging has been stripped away, we now scratch our heads bewildered at what it is exactly that was inside that yellow box.

If only Noynoy's handlers followed our simple advise. A pitch to lead a country should consist of only three components:

(1) A clearly-articulated assessment of what IS;

(2) A clearly-articulated assessment of what is envisioned TO BE after six years; and,

(3) A clearly-articulated PLAN of how to get us from what is to what is envisioned to be.

But elections are a two-way street. If only Filipino voters too had done their part and evaluated campaigns on the basis of the above. Perhaps, at best, we could now be under the rule of a more competent Chief Executive and, at worst, would have always had a clearer expectation of what we were getting when we voted for the current one.