Damage control

Damage control ahead of the upcoming impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte is the sole reason for the political events and maneuvers instigated by her camp.

Damage control, however, isn’t the Veep camp’s only obvious maneuver. Alongside it are full-blown tactics to control the narrative and the mobilization of the Veep’s rabid political base. All three are key mechanisms for what is known as “political deflection.”

But Duterte’s camp won’t outright admit these political ploys, much less admit their fear of what the trial will reveal about the Veep’s baggage of shortcomings.

Mainly because they prefer nowadays to couch whatever they are doing or are going to do in pious soundbites like “searching for the truth” or “reviving the nation,” as power-defrocked Senator Alan Peter Cayetano grandiosely preaches whenever he records his onanistic Facebook livestreams.

As dull and inconsequential as these soundbites are, Cayetano’s nevertheless remind us of a man who gets an erotic thrill from his own imagined brilliance.

Which only means that the realistic minders of the Veep know well enough that toothless Cayetano cannot now influence the Veep’s impeachment trial, thereby steering the narrative toward other explosive issues.

But no matter how the ensuing debates will befuddle and confuse us, their “political deflection” will not rest on the contentious issue of the Veep’s conviction or acquittal or if the constitutional two-thirds threshold for conviction should still be based on all 24 senators.

Instead, “political deflection” rests on the analysis that regardless of the trial’s outcome, getting ahead of any evidence that would seriously jeopardize the Veep’s political future is what her camp is trying to do.

Such future-oriented damage control can be clearly seen in the Veep camp’s noticeable messaging to discount the impeachment trial in favor of bread-and-butter issues, general corruption issues and the flood control mess.

Through selective framing and messaging, the Veep’s minders hope to prevent their loyal supporters and the public from excessively dwelling on the original damaging issue: the Veep having been charged with various high crimes.

The Veep camp’s selective framing and messaging, however, isn’t entirely new or strange. They’ve been doing it for some time now.

Late last year, in fact, the independent Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism tellingly wrote that “since last year, the Dutertes’ allied influencers and accounts seeded various narratives on social media to cast doubt on the merits of the impeachment and quell potential outrage regarding controversies surrounding the Vice President.”

While gut issues aren’t transitory but have a patina of permanence in our politics, it doesn’t at all mean that the impeachment trial can’t co-exist or be heard alongside such issues. The Veep’s camp so far refuses to publicly admit that incontestable fact.

Anyway, selective framing does allow the Veep’s camp to fully employ techniques of narrative control, techniques meant to force vocal opponents, the media and the camp’s loyal supporters to spend more time reacting to extraneous topics instead of focusing solely on the Veep’s woes.

No other recent incident nakedly bares these techniques better than the failed maleta claims of the 18 ex-aides of flood control mess fugitive Zaldy Co.

For all its engineered theatricality, the maleta claims as it stands is the obvious deployment of “political deflection’s” familiar tactic of “whataboutism” or portraying the Veep’s opponents as having either similar or worse corruption flaws.