Looking at Loren / Whistling in the dark

There is now a widening public scrutiny as to political personages who can capture top billing in the 2004 elections. Lately, Sen. Juan Flavier announced he would run for the presidency if future poll surveys would project him to a slot in the frontline. Already, former senator and Education Secretary Raul Roco has sprinted far ahead like Abou Ben Adhem of Arab lore. And if elections were held today, Mr. Roco would easily wrap the presidency up like a gift package. Movie idol Fernando Poe Jr. (FPJ), who comes second in presidential surveys, remains the Knight of the Speechless Countenance. On record, FPJ and wife Susan Roces are very much against. That was sometime ago. The betting has wild swings. He will. He won’t.

Sen. Panfilo Lacson makes no bones about his presidential ambition. The former police chief shudders like the breech of a deadly Winchester, spewing out verbal bullets to the effect that, if elected president in 2004, he would discipline this undisciplined nation like iron filings drawn to a magnet – namely, he. Except that a gauntlet as just re-emerged banging him from brow to beltline on alleged past misdeeds, like amassing fortunes on drug trafficking and his reported lead role in the massacre of Kuratong Baleleng gang. Former broadcaster Sen. Noli de Castro surprisingly has a strong showing in surveys, particularly for the vice presidency.

The personage that interests me most is Sen. Loren Legarda.

She has two advantages. She has a face that is drop-dead pretty. And she has a personality, and presumably a record that refuses to be sucked into the ugly quicksands of political chicanery that the Senate and House are notorious for. As we have seen in the latest Makati Business Club survey, both chambers of Congress landed in the cellar apropos the performance of government agencies. And the House did it again Monday, another performance in political cussedness. It voted 69-57 to throw out the impeachment charges against Comelec Commissioner Luzviminda Tancangco.

She glides, this lady senator. She floats. Loren Legarda has mastered this ballerina art. As the doors close on evil-doing in the Senate, as the senators again and again manage to enrage the public because of their antics, wrangling, finagling, feuding, conniving, showboating, back-stabbing, lying, deceiving, colluding, cribbing and stealing, posturing and pretending, Loren Legarda most of the time slips away. To boot, she has also mastered another art, that of communications. More than any other senators, Loren uses media to float like a butterfly, flicker like a fairy – and she is not stupid.

Lately, she grabbed front-page attention anew when she gave sanctuary and a Senate staff job to an impoverished lass. She is Melinda de Vera, since birth a wretched street urchin and cigarette vendress. Melinda lived on the pavement with her mother in a makeshift dwelling. And yet, she was an honor student who studied by the light of a lamppost. While other prominentoes repeatedly promised to help Melinda, Loren picked her up without much fanfare. As luck would have it, Loren’s gesture sped to the grapevine and lit her up as Good Samaritan.

Is the following luck again? Second only to then Sen. Raul Roco, Loren grabbed the limelight during the Senate presidential impeachment hearings December-January 1999-2000.

No lawyer she, no astute practitioner in the labyrinthine language of investigative lore. Loren, whenever her chance came to speak or interpellate, just asked questions. Simple questions. Direct questions. Candid questions. She was the old ABS-CBN reporter asking why this or that happened and why. She didn’t ask the Hinderburg questions like Juan Ponce Enrile or Miriam Santiago did, questions of such massive legal complexity they raised the brows of Supreme Court Chief Justice Hilario Davide. Eventually the Hindenburg questions fell astray as Mr. Roco and Ms. Legarda raised interrogation to the finesse of a whistling jab and a devastating right cross.

Now, as I think back, more than anything else, it was the Senate impeachment trial that provided Raul and Loren the brass ring to catapult themselves to unique national prominence. The whole nation ground to a standstill. Everybody stopped working, it seemed. Tens of millions were glued to television as never before. Nothing like this ever happened before. History with quicksilver legs descended on the Senate and entranced the citizenry. A sitting president was being impeached – wow! – and every participant in that trial was graven in the nation’s memory. There were heroes and villains, bravehearts and cowards, as every single second ticked out a political drama that sank stupendously into the citizenry’s psyche.

And so Loren, what now? Raul has made his mark. Is it the presidency you want? Or the vice presidency?

I suggest the first thing you should look at must be your masts. Can you get enough wind behind them to navigate you to the highest post in the land? Or do you doubt they are strong enough, that some masts being frail might falter as the winds whip with torrential strength? And you do not reach harbor? I also counsel that you recall Winston Churchill’s ringing words before the House of Commons Feb. 27, 1945, as the war wound down and a shaken England still stood proud: "It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time."

It is something you and I already contemplated in several meetings during and after the Senate impeachment hearings. And thus the acronym ROLE swifted briefly at the time – Roco and Legarda for 2004. Together, as a presidential tandem, you would be unbeatable. Raul Roco is white-hot metal steel, a surging political force your presence can enhance and balance. You, on the other hand, would provide the quiet elegance, the campaign oomph, the next female promise of tomorrow to lock up the Palace by the river. It’s too soon for you, Loren, to seek the presidency.

Yes, as Ovid said, "Everything comes gradually and at its appointed hour."

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I don’t think she was misquoted. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in Kuwait assured thousands of Filipino contract workers "that no single OFW will get hurt, that none will get dislocated from employment… and that we sustain the image of our country as a preferred source of professional quality workers." The last about "quality worriers" is merely hyperbole since the bulk of 1.3 million Filipinos working in the Middle East are caregivers and domestic help who left our country because they were largely jobless here.

But how does GMA assure them that they will not get hurt? That they will not lose their jobs?

Once the war breaks out, once about 200,000 US combat soldiers descend on Iraq, nobody really knows what chain reaction follows, what will happen to the Middle East. The predicted savagery of the war will certainly wash over to the Crescent, in what manner we are not in a position to know as yet. I do agree the Filipino diaspora there has absolutely no wish to return to the Philippines where nothing awaits them, where they will just impale themselves on the army of jobless here.

The very fact that tens of thousands of Filipinos are scheduled to be relocated (not evacuated) means they will lose their jobs. In Israel alone, there are 60,000 Filipinos, most of them caregivers. If Saddam Hussein, in a fit of vindictiveness, sends over Scud missiles tipped with bacteriological or chemical venom, many will die and that includes Filipinos working for thousands of Israeli households. There is now a terrific scramble for gas masks.

So I do not really know where GMA gets the idea Filipinos over there are a blessed flock, immune from injury and losing their jobs.

Because if many do get hurt and many lose their jobs, GMA will get badly battered. Not her fault really since our country had nothing to do with George W. Bush’s bulldog determination to level Iraq to the ground. Many would now advise our president to just keep cool, and not bring false hopes to the millions of Filipinos working in the Middle East. We may even agree with GMA that her visit to Kuwait had nothing to do with politics or forging military alliances. That this was not the first salvo of Malacañang’s campaign to woo the huge absentee vote in that region. Okay, we believe her. She will stick to her pledge not to run for president in 2004.

In the meantime, she should stay presidential.

Everybody is getting jittery. There is even the stupid fear of some that war in Iraq will reverberate here and bullets will start flying. What we should be concerned about is that the Muslims in Mindanao do not take advantage of the impending war to generate more turbulence in our unfortunate country. GMA should be a pillar of strength, not confusion.