THE economy is declining, money is scarcer, and if people are not as hungry as Noynoy declared they were—99 percent of Filipinos are starving, he said in the campaign—it is only because a more rigorously empirical economics of poverty reveals that most poor people in most poor countries—except drought- and famine-stricken ones—do have enough to eat and are able to pinch a few extra pennies for “luxuries” like another sweet from the candy jar of the corner store or another cup of tea or coffee—or in the Philippines another jigger of gin for the men at the expense of a little more of the necessities for the women and children. The main thing wrong with poor countries, the economics of poverty reveals, are men who condemn women and children to inescapable misery by their sloth and alcoholism. And yet Noynoy’s popularity continues to soar, overtaken only by the unavoidable popularity of a vice president who cannot do wrong because he really doesn’t do much.

How to explain this quizzical discrepancy between breathtaking nonperformance, decreasing well-being, on the one hand, and persistent popularity on the other? People trust Noynoy to do the little they had any expectation he would. He has well deserved to keep that trust by doing very little, indeed.

I recall what that bishop said, which assured me of his victory: “We don’t care about his lack of qualifications, it is enough that we are sure he will not disappoint his parents.” He has not disappointed anyone with prime regard to integrity and sincerity.

He is honest and he honestly believes he is doing right. He honestly believes what he says and in what his administration is doing and not doing.

Even in his near unconstitutional persecution of unpopular political personalities, it is seen rightly as unmotivated by vindictiveness on his part. Indeed, why would he be vindictive against the previous administration? It never did him any harm. He never opposed it, for one. Sen. Ralph Recto says Noy voted for GMA’s most unpopular measures like the E-VAT. Noy cast a solitary vote only against automated elections, which gave him an instantaneous landslide victory in the very evening of the elections.

To be sure, there was a half-hearted attempt by GMA’s boys to frustrate Noy’s earlier senatorial bid but it was nothing serious. It wasn’t like they were pulling all stops to thwart a man of destiny. GMA had an accurate forecast of the feebleness of his opposition in the Senate. Noy has been persecuting unpopular political personalities of the previous administration only because they were successfully demonized by the press and by themselves.

In this situation, a new administration elected with no public expectations of the future will go after the past. As the French Minister Bidault said on the eve of Dien Bien Phu, “I do not know where the government is going but I can assure the public there will be no detours.”

To be sure, Noy said in the campaign that “kung walang kurap, walang mahirap,” which is economic nonsense that works against him because there is still poverty so there must still be corruption, as witness the missing 1,999 container vans that have turned up without any of their cargo. But he has kept his small promise not to be corrupt himself. There is not a smidgen of doubt about his personal honesty. So there you have it, a president is popular if no one expects anything much of him and he disappointments no one’s small expectations.

The only really disturbing thing that needs looking into is the why and how of a declining economy. The decline is inevitable even if GMA arrested it by fiscal reforms. What economy can the Philippines speak of? No one has a clue about the real state of the economy, the stage of its decline and the reasons for it.

I do not believe the decline has anything to do with Noy’s parsimonious policy of rather doing nothing than something wrong. I agree. More money is wasted, stolen and otherwise lost than is gainfully spent by the government. Noy is as correct to hoard public funds as GMA was to replenish the public coffers with the higher taxes whose revenue Noy is hoarding. Who knows when the country will really need the money? It doesn’t need it for infrastructure of paper-thin concrete roads and matchbox bridges like the one I am looking at from my apartment.

So I have no problems with Noy’s way of doing nothing much. For those who care to search their memories, I said before the elections, before even Noynoy ran, that the ideal next president is one who would do nothing bad, not much good or even nothing at all. That would make up for the sweeping distrust of the government generated by the past nine years of a hyperactive, albeit outstandingly smart but deeply suspected, administration.

I am happy with the election result and the nothing that has come afterward.

I am not bothered that Noy went twice to the US and never got to meet with Obama but only bumped into him. I am not flustered that we have to take Noy’s word for it about what Obama said to him in passing because no official US communication will attest to it. Is this a problem? Not for me.

It is a problem only for Noy’s communications group, which foolishly raised expectations that the trip’s highlight would be a one-on-one White House meeting between the leader of the Free World and that of another small country in which the only thing of any mutual interest needed no discussion: the essentiality of the US 7th Fleet to ensure the latter’s existence. Even Noy could only have said, “Thank you, America, for saving our skins again.”

I see nothing to quibble about Noy’s escalating foreign visits, even if he vowed to eschew them as a waste and abuse when he campaigned. Good, he likes to travel. Travel broadens, certainly the girth, if you eat all the plane food served, which is inconsiderate because eating in flight gives you gas.

For the next five years, we shall read of no scandal—based or baseless—and that is the national respite I hoped for after the 2010 elections.

The only thing distasteful is the relentless yet still legally baseless persecution of the past administration for practices still rampant in the current administration, including giving the chief of staff a P50-million bonus under the table and granting behest loans in multiples of those granted—and repaid—in the previous administration. The Aquino administration’s behest loans are outstanding in every sense of the word. I particularly detest driving small people to suicide if they will not perjure themselves in a witch hunt. Causing suicide causes cancer in turn, which I wish on no one.

On the other hand, those who are being persecuted can well afford to defend themselves one way or another. Money opens many avenues of escape; not all of them immoral because sometimes the innocent have to buy their acquittal. And the constitutional presumption of innocence notwithstanding, you need more money to dig up proof of innocence than you do to pile up proof of guilt beyond all reasonable doubt. Or convince the judges of the same, notwithstanding the lack of proof either way.

I am ecstatic with Noy’s handing out a $1-million check to the Japanese in a condoling gesture. This is something that has cried to be done by our presidents, yet even his mother feared to do it, though protocol, politeness and plain decency compelled it. About time a Philippine president left the begging bowl behind when traveling abroad and whipped out the national wallet instead. Besides, a million dollars is just P44 million, a sum handily heisted if left behind.

I am also pleased as punch with Noy’s insistence that the Supreme Court surrender the part of its budget for judgeships so long unfilled as not to exist.

Sure the Constitution says that the budget of the judiciary cannot be decreased by the other two branches of the government but the budget must still be approved. And nothing stops the Supreme Court from motu propio reducing its own budget by the amount corresponding to long unfilled judgeships and long unperformed judicial functions. When it needs more and can show what for, the Court can ask for it.

I think that, if any president can be trusted to do it, Noynoy should amend the Constitution in several respects.

The first is the removal of the economic provisions that only deter legitimate foreign investments but no longer protect the country from the worst foreign depredations. There are so many egregious judicial and legislative exceptions to the ban on foreign ownership and control as to make a mockery of the constitutional restrictions. At the same time, foreign investors forced to use dummies incur an unacceptable risk from the native proclivity of grabbing what is only theirs on paper on the ground that paper possession is ten-tenths of the law because the only way for the foreigner to disprove it is to admit a constitutional violation.

The second is to shift to a parliamentary system of government; not to thwart the near-inevitable presidency of Vice President Binay. He would still be the most viable candidate for prime minister; but to ensure that the wrong choice of chief executive can be readily corrected by the same pressure of public opinion that can impeach presidents today before the end of their too long six-year term—but far more easily.

Jojo will be elected prime minister hands down if he maintains his popularity because even a cabal-ridden parliament will unite to pick, not just any of their respective party chiefs, but the one whose immense personal popularity will shore up the government of the day and support the re-election of the same members of parliament. A transitory provision should include as members of the first parliament the vice president, the incumbent senators and members of the House of Representatives, along with an equal number of freshly elected representatives. Minus the party list.

See if that amendment doesn’t pass like crap through a goose, as Patton put it. The term of the first parliament should be three years, that of succeeding parliaments five.

What we need is less parliamentary government as such, than a mechanism to abbreviate a bad choice of chief executive other than by impeachment which, as the then-opposition lamented but the now-administration relishes, is a numbers game it fully intends to play according to rules made as the game goes along.

A parliamentary system can change a prime minister as the need arises—at the risk of being changed as well by dissolution—and allow the open choice of his replacement rather than the automatic ascension of a vice president elected as an afterthought.

Finally, in a year or so, if his communications group and “tight” circle of perceptively picayune people do not get him hated, we should have in Noynoy the kind of chief executive that civilized polities like Switzerland and Norway have, which is to say one who is like the furniture, barely noticed but there when needed; a comforting, if heedless, presence, whose shambling gait will be noted ephemerally as mildly odd but finally accepted as reassuring and a certain-to-be-missed presence when it is gone. Noynoy will be the first non-president we have long needed. Enough of the politics of personality since it is the worst personalities who most make it in politics.