MANILA, Philippines--NOT SINCE THE MARCOS YEARS HAVE a president’s children been so brazen in partaking of their parent’s power. The Aquino children kept a low profile. To be sure, Ranjit Shahani tried to be influential, only to end up being just a pest. So were most of Joseph Estrada’s brood. But one really has to go back to the days of Imee Marcos as führerin of the Kabataang Barangay—with a number of Keons and Barbas and Romualdezes ruling the roost—to get a glimpse of the current Macapagal and Arroyo zest for power.
We have to point out that the Marcos children arguably handled their power with more taste and decorum than did Rep. Mikey Arroyo, who only barely manages to look totally disreputable because of people like Jude Estrada. However, Jude’s sin was that he simply didn’t pay his bills. But he didn’t try to pretend he mattered, politically, and it’s saying something that even the perennially bickering Jinggoy Estrada and JV Ejercito didn’t run around thinking they could decide matters like the leadership of the House during their father’s presidency.
Even as President Macapagal-Arroyo’s husband chose to lurk in Europe until it became clearer if he and his wife would face another embarrassing witness before the Senate, his two sons, Mikey and Dato, took to being the ringleaders in the effort to depose Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr. Mikey has taken to making coarse commentary in the media, taunting the Speaker for hiding behind the President’s skirt and saying the damaging testimony of the Speaker’s son, Jose III has made things a personal grudge match between his father, brother and himself on one part, and the De Venecia father and son tandem on the other.
To be sure, politics, like any occupation, will result in bruised egos and grudges. This shouldn’t prevent the public, though, from recognizing that at the heart of the ongoing quarrel over the leadership of the House is a mafia mentality that seems to have possessed the First Family and the inability of a Speaker—who is more willing to sacrifice his son for personal political gain—to match rhetoric with action.
The Speaker is the incarnation of traditional politics, but as a mitigating circumstance, let it be said he at least knows, instinctively, that there are lines officials shouldn’t cross, and that he has never had a reputation for being cruel and vindictive. On the other hand, there is no line the President and her family won’t cross, including the line of self-control and decorum that even the Estradas, in their most whisky-soaked and cash-crazed moments, recognized and respected when it came to political hierarchy.
These are essentially trivial distinctions, though. The President, her husband and their two sons, with lawyer Iggy Arroyo kibitzing, are engaged in posturing. This involves the sons pretending to harbor rebellious tendencies toward their mother, whom they’re painting as too kind and caring when it comes to the Speaker. Any influence they have, however, comes from their proximity to the President. And what is her position on the matter? She is head of Lakas, of Kampi, and in an honorary capacity, of the Atienza rump of the Liberal Party. No President, ever, has tried to be the leader of so many movements simultaneously. Even Marcos put the Nacionalistas in suspended animation when he created the KBL.
The Macapagal-Arroyos then are a more effective political mafia than the De Venecias, who are outnumbered, outspent, and “out-brazen” by the First Family. Yet we do not weep for them, and no decent citizen should. The De Venecias got it coming, when time and again—at the very least starting with Jose III’s decision to testify before the Senate—the Speaker had to decide between his speakership and duty to country. He came close when he thundered about the need for a “moral revolution”; it could have been his moment—like Saul’s at Damascus falling to the ground and then becoming St. Paul. Instead, today, he, with the President, will play golf at Malacañang and they will smile the crocodile smile of their profession.
This tells us that the President will want to be mother to all, but in the end blood will be thicker than water. Her being foster mom to three parties is only an expediency; she must be a real mother of only one—and her real political child is Kampi.
Her children may claim they’re talking back to her, but we all know her real darlings are her brood—and what they say counts, only because their mother wears the presidential skirt.
Copyright 2009 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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