President Rody Duterte’s popularity in a nutshell

The latest Pulse Asia survey on the approval and trust ratings for Pres. Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte apparently has remained very high at 83 percent in the last quarter of 2016. This is quite telling in the sense that in those last three months of the year, Pres. Duterte made so many controversial decisions that got him a lot of flak. But then more often than not, this flak often comes from a very political source and not directly from the people.

Amongst them was his open admittance that he couldn’t finish his war on illegal drugs in just six months simply because when he made that timetable, his information about the extent to the drug problem in this country was from his “Mayor’s perspective.”  Now that he is the President of the land, he has come to realize that the magnitude of our drug problem was so vast it has spread to three million Filipinos hooked on illegal drugs.

Hence he asked for an indefinite extension of this war on illegal drugs. Of course you have to agree with the President, his intel on illegal drugs today is the entire nation, unlike the one he had when he was Mayor of Davao City. Secondly, the whole nation was clueless as to the extent of the spread of illegal drugs in this country… no thanks to Pres. Benigno “P-Noy” Aquino III under whose watch illegal drugs spread like the plague!

But then out of the blue, a month ago, no less than Loida Nicolas Lewis demanded the resignation of Pres. Duterte because he failed in addressing the problem of illegal drugs using his own timetable. But then everyone knows that this New York socialite has yellow blood all over her veins! She doesn’t have a common touch and was merely trying to boost the chances of Vice President Leni Robredo to prematurely become the President of the land if Pres. Duterte acceded to her demand. How stupid of her!

For most of the month of December, especially after Sen. Leila de Lima left for the US and had that interview against Pres. Duterte on CNN about the extra judicial killings (EJK) that interview obviously did not affect his ratings here at home. Well one can say that the ordinary Filipino already knows Sen. Leila de Lima has been lying to them about her role in the illegal narco trade as she has been lying about her affairs with her driver Ronnie Dayan when she was still Department of Justice Secretary.

Perhaps the most divisive decision that Pres. Duterte did and made was to allow the burial of the late strongman, Ferdinand E. Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (LNB). This sparked a nationwide protest even to the point that it could end up with another People’s Power Revolt… or so they thought! Naturally supporters of the Aquino family used this issue to the hilt, trying to pry a wedge on the popularity of the President and the Filipino people that voted him into power. No dice!

But people like me who for many decades was pro-Aquino and vehemently anti-Marcos realized that this decades of the political Aquino-Marcos feud had to end somewhere and I said to myself it was time to bury the hatchet at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. After all in fairness to Pres. Duterte the Supreme Court (SC) concurred with his decision. Thus days after the burial of Marcos the daily protests started to dwindle and soon, those (they were probably paid protesters) street activities went on their other more important chores, like looking forward to their Christmas shopping.

Finally the last issue came when Pres. Duterte asked Vice President Leni Robredo not to attend Cabinet meetings anymore since she could no longer see eye-to-eye with the President’s pronouncements. Of course the Yellows were livid with this decision and many people thought and believe that in this latest tiff, surely Pres. Duterte would lose a lot of his political capital… after all, VP Leni could not hurt a fly.

Rather than get the sympathies of the Filipino people, allow me to reprint a report from the Philippine STAR that the net public satisfaction rating of the Vice President dropped after she resigned from the Duterte Cabinet. “The recent Social Weather Stations (SWS) showed that Robredo’s net satisfaction rating dropped from +49 in September to +37 in December, with a margin of error of ±3. In the latest survey conducted from December 3 to 6, 58 percent of the respondents said that they were satisfied with the vice president’s performance while 21 percent said that they were dissatisfied.”

Am sure that this rating could drop further especially when the Vice President was in New York when Typhoon “Nina” struck her home province of Bicol and she did have enough time to reschedule her trip. So there you are, whether you like DU-30 or not, a great majority of the Filipino people like his simplistic down-to-earth style, where he always shows a genuine concern for the plight of the Filipino people. He went to the war torn villages of Mindanao and was first in Bicol, but did not give out relief goods so that he would not be misunderstood as politicking! That’s Digong for you!

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