A bad idea

It seemed like a good idea at the time, ousting Joseph Estrada from office. Almost from day one, the Church, civil society and militant groups had weighed the Estrada administration and found it wanting–outstandingly, it seemed, in the moral and competency departments.

A womanizer who did not conceal his numerous liaisons, former movie actor Estrada talked out of the corner of his mouth in the monosyllables of the neighborhood toughie, jeepney driver, and real-life hoods he played in the dozens of movies for which he was known during the better years of Philippine cinema.

He was a college drop-out who favored Filipino and disdained the use of English, in which he claimed he was not proficient, and professed a down-to-earth approach to governance understandable to the “masa.”

It can be a nebulous concept, but when politicians, political analysts and sociologists talk about the “masa,” they usually mean the masses of the poor and the disadvantaged. The Philippine Left, whether armed or unarmed, sees the “masa” if awakened as the makers of history. Filipino politicians see them primarily as the determinants of the outcome of elections.

Despite dagdag bawas (vote-shaving and padding), which takes the outcome of elections out of masa hands and into those of the political elite, this view of masa power nevertheless survives. The myth is that the masa can be bribed, coerced, manipulated in an electoral system known for its fatal flaws, but in the end the masa decide, and it is the masa Estrada claimed and still claims for his exclusive constituency. In 1998 over ten million voters–mostly the masa, who else?–gave Estrada their vote.

That was then, and none of it sat well with the middle class, which fancies itself as sophisticated, English-speaking, and above all moral if only in the public sphere where they make a point of going to Church and proclaiming their loyalty to Christian family values.

The middle class attitude towards Estrada–he was uncouth, stupid, and had the morals of a tomcat–was most prominently evident in the jokes it told about him, all of them focused on his escapades with actresses and airline stewardesses, as well as his supposedly limited intellectual capacities.

But Estrada’s assuming the Presidency was especially galling to the Catholic Church. The late Jaime Cardinal Sin, thought, even before Estrada’s resounding mandate in 1998, that an Estrada victory would be “disastrous.” Which it would be, and was, most especially to Church influence in government.

The military could for a time live with Estrada. If he seemed less focused on governance than on his midnight sessions with his cronies, he was even more indifferent to those various means that kept the generals in mansions and fleets of luxury cars, while rewarding those closest to him with choice appointments.

As he proved in 2000 when he authorized an attack on the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the middle of ongoing peace talks, Estrada’s macho instincts could also be depended on to dispense with the usual complex analyses of, say, the “Mindanao problem” by favoring the direct military approach, and showing up in fatigues at the MILF’s Camp Abubakar and drinking beer with the troops.