Palace knee-jerk

Nosy Tarsee got word spreading through the corridors of power that the Palace is quietly retooling its communications arm for a fight.

Insiders say the plan is to create a confrontational Presidential Communications Office (PCO) that hits back, trades blows online, and treats every critic as an opponent to be defeated by sundown to arrest the bloodletting in the survey ratings.

If true, this would be a sharp U-turn from Dave Gomez to his antithesis, the combative Lino Cayetano, who has been waging battle against his own equally pugnacious senator-brother, Alan Peter.

Gomez ran a shop that deliberately kept politics out of its messaging. He was said to be a steady hand who put integrity first and cared more about reforms that outlast a news cycle than about winning the day’s argument.

The Palace’s attack dogs (do you see your aunt scurrying?) reportedly found this approach too polite. Those inclined to sympathy call it principled. Cynics called it a luxury that won’t survive bad polling — and the main man’s ratings are in free fall.

Why the sudden appetite for combat? Our sources point to the same culprit: the ratings.

Palace strategists, we hear, are bothered by the volume of opposition on social media and by the wilting numbers. The reflex in these situations is predictable. If the public is unhappy, the thinking goes, the message must be the problem. Louder, sharper and faster is the answer.

The ratings may not be a packaging problem. Perception tracks performance, but rebranding the same results with a more aggressive spokesperson has never turned disappointment into approval. A more clever comeback does not fill a pothole, lower the price of rice, or explain a delayed project.

The good news, as good as it is, is that the departed official’s groundwork has not vanished. The reforms he pushed remain on the table, and anyone willing to do the unglamorous work can still pick them up.

The question is whether the administration will treat this changing of the guard as a chance to examine what the government has actually delivered, or merely how it sounds.

A Palace insider put it wryly: “You can hire the loudest voice in the country, but the public still checks the price tag.”

So Nosy Tarsee asks the occupants of that grand house on the river: Is the problem the message, or that which is being conveyed?