A week before she delivered her 2007 State of the Nation Address, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was asked what her political plans for 2010 would be. She smirked and coyly quipped, “Who knows? I may run for Congress in my hometown.” But in her SONA itself she was more circumspect, saying she would step down at the end of her term. Fast forward to two years later to July 2009, when the President said that while she would be leaving the presidency in 2010 and that she fully intended to use every power her office accorded her until the very last second of the very last minute of the last hour of the last day of her term in office. Then followed five months of coquettish flirtation with the question of whether she would, or wouldn’t, pursue political office in 2010.

The answer finally came, after a week of increasingly crude flirtation with the question, on Bonifacio Day when she finally announced she was submitting to the highly-organized, yet supposedly independent and spontaneous, clamor of her provincemates for her to represent them in the House of Representatives. On Tuesday, she filed her certificate of candidacy and immediately the Palace boosters began to proclaim that this means she would be so absorbed by local politics providing conclusive proof that her anointed successor, former Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro Jr., is his own man at last. Thus by this neat conferment of political manhood, the widely believed political kiss of death of the President has been warded off.

History may eventually characterize Ms Arroyo’s political leadership as dedicated not to relentlessly pursuing specific goals, but assiduously courting every opportunity to expand her options. We will take this question up soon enough, but for now the country must confront the unprecedented desire of the President to remain a political player, even if it means running for an inferior position, something no previous president who had to leave office ever considered a viable option. To be fair, that was because Sergio Osmeña, Elpidio Quirino, Carlos Garcia and Diosdado Macapagal all failed to be reelected and so were obviously repudiated by the public, making a bid even for barrio dogcatcher ridiculous. Corazon Aquino and Fidel V. Ramos, among our single-term presidents, could both rely on enough public good will to contemplate an untroubled retirement. Ms Arroyo, on the other hand, cannot afford to relinquish power entirely and so must find an office to which she can hope to be elected.

We do not doubt that many of her provincemates will vote for her out of ethnic loyalty. We do not doubt winning a seat in the House is much easier for her than to seek either the vice presidency or a seat in the Senate. We do not doubt that she has no compunction about ditching the concept of delicadeza because such old-fashioned notions of official propriety have been alien to her during the whole of her public career. And so we doubt if appealing to her sense of history or her sense of propriety will convince her to relinquish office now, so as to avoid tainting her last months in office with suspicions that she either ignored national problems in her obsessive pursuit of a congressional seat, or that she trusted her provincemates so little that she needed the full power and resources of the presidency to secure a seat already unimpressively held by her older son.

But we do know that if the President had any decency, respect for her office, and concern for the possibility of a slightly improved legacy, she would relinquish office now, to concentrate on her bid for the House. We also know the central preoccupation of her presidency has been power with impunity, and for this reason she will relentlessly pursue expanding her limited options with her own security and impunity past 2010 in mind. She has avoided accountability up to now, and she will try to avoid accountability for as long as she lives. There remain those who will continue to uphold her in this and all her future efforts, whether out of mercenary or simply, cynical, motives, so long as she remains what she is: a living reproach to the ethics and values the rest of the country holds dear. She is a woman possessed.