“Poli-optics, another tweak in empty governance”
The curious title of today’s column is an amalgam of politics and optics. The first is an art—the art of the possible, which makes it less rigid than a science, its praxis more flexible.
The second is a tool, creating reality out of perception if successfully implemented. In political campaigns for national office, optics constitute more than half of the game. When the message is good, and the medium used to distribute the message is effective, the created perception becomes reality.
But in these days of fake news and disinformation, optics can be quickly and disingenuously contrived to influence public opinion, whether by offense or in defense of what would normally be indefensible.
The Republican Party’s long time political strategist Lee Atwater once said that “perception is reality,” making PR experts create illusions too real in the public mind.
One clear exercise in poli-optics is the recent unveiling by the Department of Agriculture of a highly subsidized sale in the Visayas of 20 pesos per kilo rice. Chimera, or an illusory promise made in 2022 by a candidate who later became agriculture secretary cum president, is now pictured as “reality” to counter Team Sara’s popularity in more than half the Visayan voting population.
Malacanang even likens Inday Sara to a “termite,” and ludicrously asserts that good Filipinos must always support their leader. But everyone and his mother knows that this is a gimmick to regain lost ground at great expense to all the taxpayers of this nation.
NFA bought palay at 19 to 23 pesos per kilo, and should sell as rice in the market at 38 to 45, but is now being sold at 20 in the Visayas. If NFA’s unsold inventory is 350,000 metric tons, that is 350 million kilos of rice, and at a loss of 20 pesos per kilo, that will cost taxpayers 7 billion pesos to subsidize.
Poli-optics it is, charged to us who must still buy rice at 50 pesos upwards. And the DA secretary’s promise that the gimmick would expand beyond the elections to Luzon and Mindanao is pure hogwash.
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Then comes this revelation about Chinese Embassy-financed “troll farms” managed by an Infinitus firm which is intended to influence poll outcomes.
Assuming their evidence is strong, why not order the NBI to quietly investigate and catch the troll factory operators red-handed?
Or is this another case of poli-optics intended to use anti-China sentiment and neutralize anti-Bongbong sentiment on the “kidnapping” of his predecessor and the spate of kidnappings and resurgence of crime?
Come on guys, every embassy that matters, especially the one at Roxas Boulevard, has been spying on us to protect and advance their country’s interests in this benighted land. They even have a resident CIA honcho, otherwise known as a “political officer.” And one of their long-time PR operators is now our ambassador in Washington DC.
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Malacañang is in crisis-management mode. Despite Claire Castro-Seechung’s pooh-poohing the dangerously low trust and approval ratings of her boss, officials from the different Cabinet departments trooped to listen to a marketing expert’s advice last Thursday on how to boost the president’s low ratings three weeks before voters troop to the polls.
The over-arching advice to the department’s communicators is “messaging that works” under the template of Unique Selling Propositions, this time tweaked into “Utos. Sundin. Palakpak”.
Every message must follow the rhythm of what the president wants (utos kuno), what their department is doing to follow that (sundin), that will make the public applaud right away (palakpak).
All projects of each department must be tied up to the president’s “vision” (meron ba?).
“Basta, utos yan ng pangulo,” (maski hindi niya alam) they must proclaim. Their achievements, whether big or mundane, must be attributed to our “hard-working” leader.
Tweaking the Build Better More slogan of the current dispensation, the guiding questions to which the departments must respond quickly are: What’s your Build? What’s your Better? What’s your More?
Message discipline must require coordination through a “presidential communications war room,” where the narrative is “controlled,” the message is “simplified,” symbols are “created,” and always, always “repeated.”
So listen to the de facto presidential mouthpiece, Claire Castro-Seechung in the next three weeks. She has been in defensive mode through tit-for-tat combat against the “forces of darkness” which she identifies as the immediate past regime and its diehards.
The marketing expert observed that her tactics do not endear the president and the Alyansa to voters; rather, the tactics turn them off.
So voice out she should the “achievements” of our “visionary” president.
He he he, vamos a ver. Let’s see how she and the communicators of the different departments get wide “palakpak” from voters by “sundin” ang “utos” ni PBbM.
Poli-optics, another tweak in empty governance.
