Whichever way the wind blows

The Inquirer reports that GMA will enforce the death penalty beginning next year:

"I shall no longer stand in the way of the executions scheduled by the courts for January," the President said at a press conference in the Camp Crame national police headquarters. "Much as I am averse, as a matter of principle, to the taking of human lives, the President must yield to the higher public interest when dictated by extraordinary circumstances."

GMA is lifting the moratorium on executions ostensibly because public interest demands it. But just last Nov 25, she said that the death penalty is of no use, and the Inquirer reports that:

"We have had executions in the past and these have provided a steam valve to vent the public's ire against hardened criminals. But these executions did not stop heinous crime," she said in that statement 11 days ago. "Executions may give us some form of emotional release and a transient sense of retribution and security, but the more effective solutions lie in fielding the entire criminal justice system against criminals, so that we can effectively curb kidnapping, robbery, murder or rape."

In short, the president will send the convicts to their execution simply because there is a demand for it. What happened to her prior reasoning against the death penalty? Is the president too much an economist that she is willing to supply whenever she sees a demand ?

This reversal in the president's position is not so much a yielding to public interest as a spineless betrayal of moral principles. Now, this is the reason why people simply cannot get to like GMA. Who, I ask, can genuinely like a leader who will do whatever her people bid her to do even if it means going against her conscience?

The president is too nebulous; you never really know her. This week she is this, the next who knows? With Estrada---he may be corrupt, unreliable and all--but you somehow have a feeling of what you are gonna get from him.

This recent volte-face on the death penalty shows how the president is vulnerable nowadays and is willing to play for an audience as minuscule as the Filipino-Chinese community. Given her lackluster popularity as evidenced by the recent surveys, she must have realized that she will need every single vote she can get come 2004. After all, there is no harm in hoping.