Thread by @mlq3

Some thoughts on the coming election, which I invite you to read. (A thread.) 2019 is a mid-term election, and like all mid-terms, the senate results will serve as a referendum on the sitting president. Why is this so? Because every president has controlled the House of Reps.

This means, if a president passes the mid-term referendum, they have a chance to get more legislation passed through both houses while a president who fails the mid-term referendum will have a hard time getting what they want, for example charter change or in investigations.

But senate's composition also matters in other ways. It was designed to have a national perspective versus local one that reps. (logically) have. That's why reforms like RH or FOI pass easily in the Senate but often fail in the House. But that requires senators capable of vision.

Because the senate is expected to be an arena for a national vision and perspective, it's also meant to be a training ground for the presidency, not least because only 3 officials are elected nationally: prexy, veeps, and senators. So it's a proving ground for potential...

which is why the results of a senatorial election is keenly watched to see who comes in at No. 1: it's taken to be a sign of ability to muster a presidential bid in the next election, since presidents have expiration dates (fixed terms). So, this means...

the day after the mid-terms (or the day after results are known) two things will begin to happen: the incumbent president starts transforming into a lame duck, and the campaign to be the next president begins, with the senatorial top vote-getter being possible front-runner.

But presidents rage against the dying of their terms: so year after their mid-term (if they are considered winners) is the time to secure their succession and achieve big changes before they become irrelevant. Composition of senate plays a big role in how possible this will be.

As I've said, different coalitions competing for control of the Senate this election. The President has his people, his backers have another, his opponents have another, and the ones in it for themselves have another. This election's unusual in President's picks being only a few.

But where the President, his backers, and the non-opposition are united, is in ensuring a permanent end to the dilemma they, as a group, have faced time and again: reform-minded interruptions to business-as-usual runs the risk of their going to jail. This has to stop permanently.

That, ultimately, is what's at stake both in 2019 and in 2022. What's always made it easier is what I mentioned early on --the one thing that will not change in 2019 is who controls the House or local governments from governors to barangay chairmen. In that sense., regardless...

of whether there's a senate inclined to play ball or investigate the current President, the House and local governments are thoroughly and permanently in the hands of people just like the President. And who can keep future presidents tied down in having to make deals with them.

Except for the same thing that showed the current President his limits, just as it did all his predecessors: public opinion. The 20-point drop from Kieran's killing to the opening of the campaign required a lot of movement to recover, which tired out the President and also...

along the way, encouraged his allies to act more independently than in any presidency before. Example? GMA being the first Speaker in our history who became such without the blessing or permission of the sitting president. And the way the House treated the President's econ team.

Killings and inflation were a double-whammy that took out steam from the administration when it was geared up to steamroll its way to a new constitution among other things. But the President and his people reclaimed popularity and thus clout in time for the mid-terms, which meant

critics faced a public too frightened (or too rejuvenated in its formerly shaken-blood-lust) to support it, though it recovered significantly enough that the President had to keep blasting the opposition directly because the various non-opposition slates were for themselves.

Still, as the President becomes a lame duck the fear factor he relied on to keep local officials in line will start to evaporate but there is one semi-permanent legacy the President's indifference to most of the usual requirements of his job will have. It can be seen...

in what replaced his formal ruling party, PDP-Laban: Hugpong, which is not a party but a coalition of provincial and urban barons united to achieve what I pointed out earlier. They're used to carving things up between them, and not putting together something national in scope.

In fact, there was a down-and-dirty fight for what sort of political landscape would be the legacy of this President, and it was fought between Bong Go representing the traditional provincial warlord point of view and Evasco, who represented an equally sinister but national one.

Evasco proposed a national movement, with an ideology, structure, and the use of government agencies committed to making this movement a permanent national force with agents in all government departments. Go systematically opposed this, representing the existing local leaders.

Of course no one paid attention to this fight because except for occasional public showdowns like rice, it was fought through presidential issuances: the signing and revoking of executive orders, etc, representing the seesaw of influence at any given time. Evasco lost. Totally.

Which means that Go's victory and graduation to the Senate is not just as the last patakbuhin of the president standing, but also, the candidate of the local barons who want nothing more and nothing less than to be left to their own devices, which is the extraction of fees.

The top two vote-getters for the Senate, if the surveys are to be believed (and why not?) tells us why the President's indifference, even hostility, to a national perspective is significant in its after-effects. Poe is a personality without a party while...

Villar is the owner of party machinery who lacks personality. But both have mastered the game, which is to attract without substance or matter because of logistics, it all ends up the same: vulnerable to, because dependent on, the ruling money. After all, except for...

the much-despised LP or PDP (which remains the ghostly survivors of when parties were primarily political vehicles) and the Communists, all the other major parties are actually subsidiaries of the large corporations or their owners (Ang's NPC, Villar's NP, Razon's NUP, etc.)

Arroyo found the PDP so worthless she preferred to work through and with, and be part of, Hugpong, which is setting itself up as the future: one which puts the local ahead of the national, viewing the national whole as a pie to simply subdivide among its leaders. The future!

But again the troubling trend is that there are built-in behaviors that limit those of the leadership, much as it wants a permanent solution that will just make life easy, predictable, and profitable, for themselves. These trends are that at the end of the day, the public still

gets angry over corruption; that as much as it expects empathy and punishes those who don't provide it, it also can punish the corrupt (or at least step aside if they get caught); it somehow still prefers governments not to focus on killing their fellow citizens, etc. In other...

words, from time to time and for varying periods of attention and dedication, it still takes many of the principles that trip easily off the tongues of politicians a little more seriously than the politicians take them themselves. This is despite the way the media owners...

as a whole long abdicated any pretense to helping nurture and protect a culture of not just free but informed debate and inquiry on the airwaves. Despite the collapse of the educational system only starting to be rebuilt under K-12, etc. It's shown in how among themselves, the

politicians are finding the electorate an increasingly expensive and difficult to control proposition. They have done their own version of mergers and acquisitions, smoking the peace pipe, carving up local fiefdoms among formerly competing families, because the same families...

find it too difficult to fight other families and still win elections. But the mergers and acquisitions have limits just as gerrymandering will face a limit in that there are fewer and fewer big places left to subdivide into small, safer (politically-speaking) territories. Even

the families themselves are running out of candidates or proxies as more Filipinos modernize and realize there are better (more profitable, less dangerous, less soul-eating) ways to move ahead in the world than politics. So this explains why the priority of both local and...

national leaders has been to abolish national elections and restrict the selection of national leaders to something to do among themselves, hoping they can establish something as juicy and happy as Malaysia's one party state --except that in their thirty years of failing to...

reproduce Malaysia here, the Malaysians themselves came to discover what we'd discovered all along: that system is what we already knew as tayo-tayo, which finally, epically, fails as Marcos and Najib discovered for very similar reasons. But this is looking too far ahead...

We should remember the same Filipino people who supported Marcos's dictatorship was the same that threw him out; the same electorate that voted into the senate a Diokno (Jose W., that is) or a Recto (Claro M. that is) also elected the first showbiz senator, Rogelio de la Rosa.

The same electorate that voted for Cory voted for Erap just as the same one that voted Erap voted for Arroyo or who voted for Ramos voted for Noynoy which then voted for Duterte --there is too much overlap not to say otherwise-- so the takeaway from this is to understand why.

To understand why the people not only supported Marcos but threw him out is to understand why we could have a Duterte and to see not only why but how the mind of the people might change, maybe overnight but just as likely, over a generation. The only way to retain sanity though..

is to develop your own compass rather than rely on those of others because if the only permanent condition is that of change, you will need your own compass to avoid becoming permanently dazed and confused.

A parting thought. In the past, elections were a boost to the economy. That's probably true now, too. You don't get. Bong Go's numbers unless you spend, spend, spend. But since the economic numbers just announced are lw, it tells you the overall numbers must be really bad!

Finally: however expressed, as a way to get paid by a candidate or to pay your dues to society by thoughtfully casting your vote, it's better more of us get to weigh than less of us. We sink or swim together, no finger-pointing! Majority wins.