Pitfalls of the presidency according to Max

The State of the Nation Address is just around the corner. People have already begun to audit the President’s work. We have been looking back and evaluating his ability to lead the country. Everybody has been scrutinizing his presidency.

Many friends of my late father have asked, “What would Max Soliven have written about P-Noy if he were alive today?” I found a column of my dad which discusses the possible pitfalls which could derail a Presidency. I think that P-Noy must truly reflect upon himself of his role in leading the country. He must come up with an over-all “impression” he wants the public to view him as and give us a definite “direction” into which he wants this country to become. The following excerpt from my late father is a good “cheat sheet” for P-Noy to take heed of. So here it goes:

When should such a message of awareness be delivered, except right at the beginning of his journey? It may not prevent our new Chief Executive, today embarking on a great adventure so vital to us all, from making his own mistakes. But forewarned, as the old adage goes, is always forearmed.

The warnings being reprinted in this corner are, it must be said at the start, not new – but 33 years old. And yet, it will be immediately apparent how valid and resonant they still are. They were uttered on December 29, 1965, on the eve of his departure from Malacañang by the late President Diosadado Macapagal (parenthetically, the father of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) and addressed to Cong. Dadong’s successor, the man who had just defeated him, the President-elect Ferdinand E. Marcos.

In his last radio-television address to the public, outgoing President Macapagal pointed out what, gleaned from his experience and personal observations are the major pitfalls affecting the success or failure of a President.

The first pitfall, DM said, “is the isolation of a President from the people and from reality by a cordon of persons who will continually seek to please him and influence his decisions in the guise of promoting his success, but in many cases promoting their own interests.”

A second pitfall, the late Mr. Macapagal warned Marcos, is the “the tremendous temptation for graft and corruption that confronts a President.” He cautioned his successor to steel himself against yielding to the avaricious impulse of participating in corruption and graft, or tolerating it, particularly when engaged in by any member of his family.

A third pitfall singled out is the difficult choice between making the decisions as a statesman, or as a politician. Macapagal underscored that a President should decide primarily on the basis of what is good for the people, irrespective of political consequences, and secondarily only on considerations of political position. (For precisely this reason, the farmers of the post-Marcos 1987 Constitution chose to restrict an elected President to a single term of six years without reelection, to insulate him from being swayed by partisan politics).

The fourth pitfall mentioned by Macapagal is succumbing to the importuning of the powerful and catering to entrenched vested groups responsible for the social inequities in our community.

The fifth pitfall would be for a President to ignore the basic national problems of the poverty of the masses.

Macapagal, who had risen to the Presidency on the slogan that he was “ the Poor Boy from Lubao” reminded the incoming Marcos that “ a President who is not guided by an adequate social orientation towards justice for the unprivileged may be handicapped in effectively meeting the challenge of the Presidency.”

The sixth pitfall to be avoided “is an impulse to use the Presidential power without regard for the Rule of Law.”

Although he did not refer to it, Mr. Macapagal had himself set aside this very rule of law when, in the first days of his Presidency, he had dispatched army Scout Rangers to the Central Bank to bodily oust the late President Carlos P. Garcia’s “midnight appointee” to the Central Bank Governorship, Dominador J. Aytona, and install his own man, the late CB Governor Andres V. Castillo. For this harsh application of force, DM had been roundly attacked by media (as a doctor of Laws, he could not even plead “ignorance” of it as a mitigating factor).

The seventh pitfall concerns a President’s attitude towards media, Macapagal admonished Marcos. He noted that a President who is onion-skinned and resentful of media criticism can either tolerate criticism, or deplorably move to cow or corrupt the press by one tactic or another.

At the conclusion of his farewell list of admonitions, Dadong tacked on the eighth caveat. At the end of his term, he averred. A President should readily relinquish his power to his successor and not yield to the opiate of power or its vanity by seeking to perpetuate himself by dubious means in violation of the Constitution.

As anyone can plainly see in retrospect, in his twenty-year hegemony, Marcos disregarded each and every one of those eight injunctions, particularly the final one, as he strove to perpetuate himself as a self proclaimed Martial Law Messiah and President-for-life.

The most self-perpetuating quotation about politics is that attributed ad nauseam to Britain’s Lord Acton (the one thing for which the honorable peer is remembered): “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The author of this memorable line does not add that power is, moreover, absolutely delightful.

Anyway, there you are.

The past is a kingdom to which a grown man can, of course, never return. But as he takes over the scepter of his new kingdom, we pray that the President will remember the pledges that he made then.

I pray that the President and his men be enlightened to inspire the Filipino people rather than bring us to our dismay. Since the time he sat in power his communication “boys” have disheartened us with all their shenanigans. Here’s hoping that they be guided with compassion and wisdom in the days to come. God bless the Philippines!