It must be tough to be speaking for the President these days. The already difficult job of conveying the official line of the chief executive on various issues is made even more complicated by the challenge of minimizing the damage wrought by Mr. Duterte’s actual incendiary words.
Take, for instance, that latest statement the President made Friday about being happy to slaughter the 3 million drug users in the country, in the same manner as Adolf Hitler exterminated the Jews.
The following day, presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella issued his own statement saying that Duterte’s reference to the slaughter was “an oblique deflection of the way he has been pictured as a mass murderer, a Hitler, a label he rejects.”
Hitler’s murder of innocent civilians and Duterte’s willingness to kill criminals to save the future of the next generation are two entirely different things, Abella added.
The same effort can be said of Palace spokesmen regarding numerous earlier pronouncements by Mr. Duterte: threatening to bolt the United Nations, cursing the president of the United States, saying we would now ally ourselves with China and Russia, and telling foreign investors we don’t care if they take their money elsewhere, among others.
Many excuses have been offered, the most common of which is that the President’s words were taken out of context or that he was carried away by his passion to effect real, tangible change in the country. The President must be too much of an enigmatic man that nobody can figure out what his context is. Not even the supposedly brilliant minds we have at the Senate and at the House of Representatives are amused at guessing and second-guessing Duterte. We cringe to think we have not even reached the 100-day mark; how do we survive nearly six more years of this?
Indeed, efforts to explain the President’s words have yielded results quite the opposite of what these officials intended. At best, they sound funny and pathetic. At worst, they paint the picture of a President so unintelligible and so irrational that one cannot reasonably tell what damaging, disruptive, and embarrassing thing he would come up next.
Perhaps instead of speaking outward to a befuddled public, these spokesmen and other officials should huddle around their boss and advise him to be a little more temperate. And perhaps then they can focus on the essential nature of their job: to make the people understand, and appreciate, the administration’s message of change. Governing is possible, even without expletives.
Everybody knows that being a maverick is part of Duterte’s appeal that caused him to win the presidency through a large plurality. But some things you can only take so far—especially when you are responsible for the well-being, and the future, of more than 100 million Filipinos.
