Forbes Magazine sold out because people wanted to know ‘why’

Wanted to know what?

Within hours of wire service reports announcing that the latest issue of the international business magazine FORBES had named besieged President "Gloria Arroyo" the fourth most powerful in the Top Ten of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the World, every copy of that edition, hot off the press, had been snapped up in Metro Manila.

Is this because La Presidenta is so popular here? If so, how come the July 11 issue of TIME Magazine, with an unsmiling GMA on its cover, cover-headlined "Falling From Grace? Can Arroyo Salvage her Presidency?" is still, weeks later, available on the newsstands. Only yesterday, I saw a couple of copies still left unsold in the Glorietta’s Mercury Drug Store.

I can only surmise the FORBES issue sold like proverbial hot cakes because everybody wanted to know WHY, for all her troubles, GMA is still rated Number Four worldwide. Indeed, she actually went up. In last year’s listing by the same magazine of the Top Ten Most Powerful Women, La Gloria had rated only Number 9, in fact just behind Indonesia’s former President Megawati Sukarnoputri.

Last year’s listing were (1) Condoleezza Rice; (2) Wu Yi; (3) Sonia Gandhi; (4) Laura Bush; (5) Hilary Rodham Clinton; (6) Sandra Day O’Connor; (7) Ruth Bader Ginsburg; (8) Megawati; (9) GMA; and (10) Carleton Fiorina.

This year, Number 1 is still US Secretary of State Condi Rice; and Number 2 is still China’s Vice Premier and Minister of Health Wu Yi.

Out of nowhere, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko of the Ukraine has shot up to Number 3; but, by golly, GMA is up, too, to Number 4 – way ahead, by the way, of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, who is in the 75th place!

Even the composition of the Top Ten has changed. Number 5 is Margaret Whitman, Chief Executive of Ebay/US; (6) Anne Mulcahy, Chief Executive, Xerox; (7) Sallie Krawcheck, Chief Financial Officer, Citigroup/US; (8) Brenda Barnes, Chief Executive, Sara Lee/US; (9) Oprah Winfrey, the television star, Chairman, Harpo/US; and (10 Melinda Gates, Co-founder, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, US.

According to Associated Press, however, FORBES commented that GMA "could soon be off if she fails to survive impeachment proceedings brought against her by the opposition who alleged she cheated her way to victory last year."

Elizabeth MacDonald and Chana R. Schoenberger of FORBES in their July 29 explanation described the magazine’s choices as "the up-and-comers, the ones to watch, the returnees. Here are the women who make things happen."

For all the fire and brimstone being heaped on her head, let’s face it, La Gloria has even gone up the ratings of women "who make things happen", even though bad things are happening to her.

MacDonald and Schoenberger, of course, go on to point out that "our second ranking of the world’s most powerful women illustrates how fleeting power is. Megawati Sukarnoputri, the former president of Indonesia who lost her reelection bid (N.B. to the new President, General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono) dropped off the rankings."

"Gone, too, is Carleton (Carly) Fiorina, booted from Hewlett-Packard. The scandal-plagued president of the Philippines Gloria Arroyo (#4) could soon be off as well."

Can’t blame the magazine editors and "judges" for hedging their bets, but FORBES in this bleak hour for her has given La Gloria a timely boost.

* * *

US Secretary of State Condi Rice, as AP pointed out, "has beaten 99 female heads of state, chief executives, and celebrities to top FORBES magazine’s list…" In fact, AP noted that "the magazine saw Rice as wielding such raw power that she won last year’s inaugural rankings, even before Bush gave her the secretary of state job. She won as Bush’s National Security Adviser."

Again, we can’t blame AP’s Gilian Wong, in her dispatch datelined Singapore, for gushing over Condoleezza Rice – but c’mon. Sure, Condi’s "superwoman" American-style, precocious as a child, a black kid from Birmingham, Alabama, (in the 1950s and 60s the most segregated city in the South), an athletic ice-skating champ, a topnotch concert pianist, a whiz in education at both Notre Dame and Princeton, an expert on the old Soviet Union, the new Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, speaking Russian fluently, French and German competently, the daughter of Presbyterian Minister and educator John Wesky Rice III, Susmariosep – she’s got it all.

Everyone knows the Cinderella story which prefaced the adoring semi-authorized biography of Ms. Rice by Texas-based author Antonia Felix, entitled, what else, CONDI (Pocket Books, 2002).

When Condi was ten years old, the story went, her parents took her on a trip to Washington, DC. For John and Angela Rice, the nation’s capital was the ultimate vacation destination.

"Strolling along Pennsylvania Avenue," Felix wrote, "they stopped to peer through the gate in front of the White House. Condoleezza stared silently at the pillared facade. The trio stood in silence until the girl turned to her father and said: ‘Daddy, I’m barred out of there now because of the color of my skin. But one day, I’ll be in that house."

As biographer Felix underscores, Condi proved prophetic.

"Twenty five years later she was working fourteen hour days as President George H.W. Bush’s top advisor on the Soviet Union, helping write US policy through the unification of Germany and the end of the Cold War. Eleven years after her two-year stint in that administration, she reentered the White House as President George W. Bush’s national security advisor."

The reason then Condi Rice is Number 1 as "most powerful woman" on earth is Bush and Bush. Namely, Daddy Bush and Dubya Bush.

Do you think if Ms. Rice were not woman topkick in the US State Department and a habitué of the Oval office in White House, with the ear of the President of the only global Superpower and were, say, only President of Slovenia, or Uganda, she’d be where she’s rated?

That’s the way it is in this world.

But let’s give her what’s due. She battled the odds and beat them.

One thing is clear, though. As far as Southeast Asia is concerned (elsewhere she can’t ignore those giants, China and India), Rice is a disaster. It’s not just that she snubbed the ASEAN meeting in Vientiane, Laos, but the fact that in her calendar of global concerns, Southeast Asia is terra incognita, and worse, of irritating but little concern.

Her mother, a pianist and organist and a very learned lady had named her from the Italian term con dolcezza, which in a score of music directs the performer to play "with sweetness". For the Philippines, particularly to La Gloria, whom she regards as having abandoned the Americans on the battlefield in Iraq, by precipitately withdrawing the already ridiculously tiny Philippine contingent from the "coalition of the willing," Condi nurses no sweetness and has no love at all.

Somehow, President Bush still likes GMA and has a soft spot for the Philippines. Why?

That’s another question.