Playing not to lose

Capping Vice President Sara Duterte’s new quarreling posture is the latest Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey notably showing that more Filipinos than ever are unsatisfied with her performance.

Her 19-point drop in satisfaction was quickly met with audible snickers from Ms. Duterte’s vocal detractors. A precipitous drop which turns out to be her lowest satisfaction rating since assuming the vice presidency.

Subsequently, her detractors’ snickers turned to broad-toothy smiles and even loud guffaws, making it abundantly clear there’s now an inspired campaign to shake salt on her punctured self-esteem and to further tarnish her political shine.

As of my writing, Ms. Duterte’s hardcore cabal and besieged army have yet to make any definitive counters or arresting thought-burps to cushion the survey’s impact and silence the critics.

But before everything careens to theatrical sloganeering and can’t, I propose Ms. Duterte’s secretive cabal knew beforehand they had to shore up her shaky political status even before the results of the latest survey were published.

Saying so isn’t presumptuous. If it were otherwise, Ms. Duterte wouldn’t have broken ranks with the Marcos administration just as the latest survey was coincidentally wrapping up.

Initially, there was a mixed bag of heady speculations surrounding the timing of her falling out with the Marcos administration.

Except probably for the filial need to support her ICC-beleaguered father and to rally the Duterte allies, putting the finger on the exact motives for her attacking form, however, were inadequate.

On hindsight, however, Ms. Duterte’s frontal attacks against erstwhile electoral allies give us the compelling insight that she and her cabal were all along “playing not to lose.”

By and large in pop psychology, the psychologically weak “playing not to lose” is all about protecting what you already have.

In direct contrast to it is “playing to win,” which means playing with intent focus on winning a winner-take-all match, no matter the harm.

Evidently in Ms. Duterte’s case then, her advisers did somehow acutely sense that they urgently needed to do something dramatic to preserve whatever support she may still have.

Giving credence to this urgency is the fact that in the SWS survey, Ms. Duterte was losing ground in all regions, even in Mindanao.

In Mindanao, her rating declined from +80 to +73. Significant drops were also seen in the Visayas (+47 from +54), Metro Manila (+32 from +42), and Balance Luzon (+31 from +40). Her rating in the rural areas also decreased from +58 to +42.

Nonetheless, Ms. Duterte and her cabal obviously aren’t about to admit they’re playing the politically weak “playing not to lose” card.

Instead, they’re painting Ms. Duterte’s unburnished attacks on the Marcos administration as a “playing to win” card.

She is manifesting the “playing to win” card when she says our leaders “should not be motivated by cash, cocaine or champagne; and, most certainly, leaders should not be made to hold champagne glasses,” all of which were pointed snarky remarks against the Marcoses.

Critics, however, quickly pounced on her divisive rhetoric, generally observing that her tirades were merely a series of sobbing noises in closed brackets since her statements didn’t so much as clash with but tortured her previous role in the Marcos government.

As one critic opined regarding the saturated irony of her statements: “She can’t paint herself as a bastion of leadership arriving to shake things up as she’s been at the heart of government since 2022.”

Her daring efforts at galvanizing the anti-Marcos feeling all around, therefore, requires first that she comes clean regarding her shortcomings on her use of confidential funds and on her lackluster stint as Education secretary.

In a similar vein, critics slammed her efforts at trying to picture her political dynasty as being a little better than it really was.

Candidly speaking, in light of recent revelations that now show it wasn’t great the first time the Dutertes were around, there’s just no way of telling it will be great again if the Dutertes are still very much around.