PRESIDENT Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo jetted off to San Francisco en route to Washington and eventually, New York, with the objectives of her trip still up in the air. Meetings with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (widely whispered to be no fan of the President) and with candidate Barack Obama (putative nominee of a party critical of her human rights record) have not been confirmed.

And with good reason, which has little to do with the prestige--or lack of it--of our President.

The presidential party will be arriving in Washington during the US Congress' last session week (Tuesday to Thursday) before the Independence Day break--and in an election year, when legislative work takes a backseat to the campaign which is already afoot. The Americans will be presented with a logistical nightmare: congressional practice involves US legislators meeting their foreign counterparts on a one-for-one ratio of hosts and visitors.

One of the main purposes of the President's visit is to thank the US Senate. We wonder then why she's bringing only two senators, neither of whom are the direct counterparts of the US senators she should be thanking.

As for lobbying the US House--where the American Congress will find a huge function room to accommodate the horde of Filipino congressmen accompanying the President--and the protocol problem of what to do with the Filipinos when only a dozen American congressmen or less are the point persons of the Veterans Bill (and they are the only ones who will be remotely interested in--briefly--meeting their Filipino counterparts), these will be interesting to watch.

We suspect, however, that our government knows this and that the actual number of Filipino officials accompanying the President to meet American officials will be much smaller. The horde of congressmen and the two token senators, the 10 Cabinet members and the President's own family will probably spend their time doing other things. The First Family, for one, will want to know how their San Francisco properties are doing. We can be confident other Filipino officials will similarly be inclined. At least Speaker Prospero Nograles has been frank about the main purpose of his visit: to attend Manny Pacquiao's upcoming fight in Las Vegas.

It may be that the bloated presidential party is really more of presidential assistance to get Filipino officials in the courtesy lanes of immigration and customs. This is the official equivalent of what ordinary Filipinos do whenever they chance upon an official convoy on the road: turn on their hazard lights and pretend to be part of the official party.

It has been a century since the first Filipino political junket took place. On May 23, 1908 Majority Floor Leader Manuel L. Quezon of the Philippine Assembly left Manila for St. Petersburg, Russia, as a delegate to a navigation conference. Since then, the Filipino political junket has been perfected.

In the relatively prosperous pre-war years, the junkets were condemned in the press as too large but those pale in comparison to the present. In 1919, when Filipino politicians began the independence missions (14 in all) to America, their total composition reached 49 members, of whom four were senators, six were congressmen, and two were Cabinet members. The rest were government officials of different ranks and lobbyists. But the scale of the missions was never again as large as the first. In 1933, the OsRox mission that secured the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Act numbered a dozen; in 1934, the final mission to secure independence (the Tydings-McDuffie Act) was composed of only nine delegates.

Whether prewar or postwar, presidents were taken to task for bringing along an entourage--including aides and hangers-on--of about two dozen people. The most lavish presidential trip of all time--Ferdinand Marcos' 1981 state visit to Washington--was truly on a grand scale but as it was a state visit, Washington footed the bill. But even Marcos, still basking in his glory days as a valuable American ally, didn't bring a quarter of the membership of the Batasang Pambansa with him.

And he knew better than to time his trip in an election year, and to meet a lame duck.