Mr. Duterte has no struggle with dignity. He is the first Filipino president to reverse the traditional, dignified politics of public decency with the politics of private scandals, obscenities and cusses.

Every time he stands before a podium, he inevitably cracks crass and vulgar remarks on sex, priests, murder or whatever subject he fancies he needs to extemporaneously pontificate on, unnerving a lot of people. Neither does he hesitate about shamelessly displaying and confessing his deficiencies and weaknesses.

And all of these are dismissed by his jaded spokesmen as just “jokes.”

He, too, is not going to stop anytime soon. His last confession of him sexually abusing a maid during his teenage years in a speech before a large audience in Kidapawan, Cotabato is but cautionary that his future speeches will be erringly similar and familiar.

Yet, the more he is being called out for his outrageous off-the-cuff remarks, the more he manages to maintain his popularity and keep his vaunted political authority, his strongman persona, intact. All the crassness and vulgarities seem affirmations of Mr. Duterte and he is succeeding.

Even if all these vulgarities seem to “abnormally endear” him to people, as an analyst wryly notes, it still dislocates us with a perplexing political development. It is as if Mr. Duterte is proving people, particularly his devoted followers, don’t want a perfect leader. He is proving that people can accept a national leader with evident vulgarities, with weaknesses like what most people have.

“He is an authentic person” is a common enough saying among Mr. Duterte’s devoted followers, which is another way of saying his populist, personalist regime is by its lonesome self seemingly better than the country’s previous “decent but elitist” regimes.

This is a political fact which his devoted followers scathingly drum into the unwilling, disgusted ears of the many others who want to believe Mr. Duterte is a mere buffoon.

Of course, for the smarter and harshest critics of Mr. Duterte, the buffoon label does not go far enough — they altogether dismiss the “authenticity” effect of all his speeches as nothing but “false humanization.”

There is some truth to this as I am of the firm impression Mr. Duterte is a careful, skillful and consistent politician in cultivating this image of being “just like an ordinary guy like the rest of us.”

In fact, Mr. Duterte’s speechifying should not deceive us as his people openly admit it is in fact his style. Mr. Duterte also says the same thing and insists he is not about to change the way he speaks anytime soon.

Uniqueness in vulgarity, however, is not a good marker as Mr. Duterte is not alone in this particular political ploy as he is but another reflection of a trend theorist Slavoj Zizek has pointed out: this is how many political leaders all over the world operate nowadays.

Disappearing nowadays, says Zizek, is the old model in politics of a masterful leader ruling with dignity — that old way is now replaced by leaders leading by way of vulgarities. As an example, Zizek says Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Mr. Duterte admires, makes use of this same tendency, with his political handlers admitting the Russian leader’s public vulgarities were thought out and planned.

Can it be then Mr. Duterte and his people have been planning these things all along to maintain political power? It seems so to me. And they are doing it seemingly masterfully, even if there are strong indications the President’s men are clueless on exactly how they do it.

Nonetheless, as in all good things, too much “authenticity” will eventually corner this administration. It is like what happens after eating all the rich, lavish foods during the New Year — all of us thereafter just want rice and dried fish. It is as inevitable as that.

There is also this old European proverb which says that if you talk too much, you either want something or you want to hide something. In other words, when you are really afraid that something could happen, you talk a lot to make sure it doesn’t happen — which in turn gives us the best clue on how properly to react.

So, we should not lose sight of the fact that Mr. Duterte’s vulgarities, dished out by him in proper intervals and which elicits elation among followers and outrage among critics, actually “drowns the future in the present.” In short, he wants to regale us only on what he says in the present instead of us insisting he needs to do better in achieving our future well-being.

Our best reaction to this, therefore, is not to dismiss all these crassness and vulgarities, or worse, be used to them. Instead, we must forcefully correct this compulsion of the President to discourse colorfully on mundane issues by insisting he finally focuses on the biggest issue of all — poverty.

It is quite telling Mr. Duterte is not often talking about poverty when it should be the other way around. Poverty is the one issue lurking behind or underneath all the issues he fondly talks about, be it illegal drugs, corruption, insurgency and even religion.

I am not saying the President lacks vision on slaying the poverty monster but it is about time he seriously starts telling us more often what he has in mind instead of wasting time questioning Christianity, a subject which makes him so cartoonish and flimsy.