AFTER seven years in office, the President of the Philippines and her officials should be conducting our national affairs with greater aplomb and less bumbling. But bumble she did (and bumble they all did) as the Palace desperately sought a sign of endorsement from the American president-elect. She could have simply sent a telegram and lobbied behind the scenes for a return call. Instead, she threw herself at Barack Obama, and her subordinates threw a tantrum when she was rebuffed.

To top it all off—and this is what has caused the latest wave of national exasperation over the antics of our bumbler-in-chief—it comes at the incompetent little heels of previous, clumsy attempts at securing an Obama photo opportunity for President Macapagal-Arroyo.

It began when the President went to America in order to consult Washington and, along the way, establish a working relationship with the two contenders for the US presidency. John McCain obliged her, which was to be expected considering the uneasy but still fruitful relationship our President had with the Bush administration. The Republicans had warmly embraced the Arroyo administration, to the extent of Bush addressing our Congress, something no American President had done since the time of Dwight Eisenhower. President Arroyo’s clumsy abandonment of the so-called Coalition of the Willing led to Washington adopting a frosty attitude towards the Philippines.

However, the President made up for it by essentially giving Washington a free rein in Mindanao while she cut her losses, and then embarked on cozying up to Beijing. This is something no American administration would have tolerated, except that Southeast Asia, in the Republican scheme of things, had essentially been delegated to Australia as a sphere of influence and interest. Washington was content to limit its Philippine involvement to putting a stop to the President’s plans to impose martial law, not because of any concern for Philippine democracy, but more out of a desire not to undercut its own insistence on then Pakistani President Musharaf not embarking on an outright dictatorship.

But the Bush White House’s turning a blind eye to the President’s actions in most other respects led to increased scrutiny of her behavior by the opposition party, the Democrats. Much as the election of Carter made Washington less enthusiastic about Marcos—and Democrats proved to be the most committed allies of Filipinos working to restore democracy—Democratic control of the House marked both the beginning of the Americans’ repudiation of Bush and the adoption of a more skeptical environment for the Arroyo administration in US congressional circles.

Barack Obama, whose campaign repudiated the might-makes-right unilateralism of the Bush administration, could hardly be expected to warmly embrace a Philippine President who has made a career, clumsy or not, of firmly tying herself to Bush’s apron strings. This would have implied an immediate endorsement of Ms Arroyo’s shifting policy orientation from Washington to Beijing, and her maladroit handling of Mindanao, including her downplaying of our traditional warm alliance with Jakarta and substituting it with a naïve partnership with Kuala Lumpur.

To be sure, Washington has to deal with Manila, regardless of who’s in charge. But Obama is the leader of a party that, together with the many friends of the Philippines in Europe, did the most to put a stop to the Intengan-Gonzalez strategy of neutralizing the administration’s enemies by supporting people like Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan. They know as well that martial law was in the cards of the Palace in 2005-2006. And that the House of Representatives here at home is poised to report Charter change out of a committee and throw it to plenary, the first step in provoking a confrontation with the Senate, that might have to be resolved by an ever-growing administration majority in our Supreme Court.

They know, too, that even as the new American administration has proclaimed it will support democracy, consensus and development in regions neglected by the Republicans, the Arroyo administration is poised to lose American funding for projects because of corruption growing by leaps and bounds. All these are reasons, from the American point of view, not to go out of the way—even before Obama assumes office—to embrace our President.