Comparing apples with rotten oranges

President Aquino’s third State of the Nation Address is the scariest I’ve heard, and here’s where I’m coming from.

He may be the best President we’ve ever had, which is not to diminish others who might have been as righteous: Manuel L. Quezon, according to history; Ramon Magsaysay, according to legend; his own mother, Cory Aquino, according to her admirers as well as her detractors. But their presidencies were diminished by fate and circumstance—Quezon’s by our American overlords and Japanese invaders, Magsaysay’s by a plane crash, and Cory’s by a military with a murderous craving for its happy days under Ferdinand Marcos.

Mr. Aquino’s presidency, on the other hand, is the creation of fate and circumstance, and a very happy one for our country. Fate and circumstance have given us a President who’s not only righteous, who not only appears to be righteous, but whom even his critics believe to be righteous.

I don’t know that this country will again have a President so, well, Arthurian.

Indeed, his righteousness has borne economic fruits. I won’t question his numbers (GDP growth rate, unemployment drop rate, credit rating upgrades, Department of Education backlogs being filled, and all that) or quibble with his hyperbole (“4.57 million students no longer need to miss school because of poverty”), not even with his pipe dream (“and, if the weather cooperates, we’ll be able to export rice next year”).

But I won’t accept the yardstick he persists in using on his administration’s performance, which is the short and crooked one of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s. It scares the “kwan” out of me that the best President we’ve ever had will only surpass the bar set by the worst president we’ve ever had (next to Marcos, if you will). Surely, it must be clear to him by now that it’s crystal to most of us: His administration and Arroyo’s are as different as apples and rotten oranges. So I fear that his purpose is not to belabor that point but to lower our expectations of his presidency.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong.

I won’t concede either to his rhetoric that those who might criticize him want to forgive and forget the crimes of the past. It’s a device that Fox News has elevated to black art: Discredit the criticism by imputing immoral intentions to the critic. Surely, a President so righteous need not be so self-righteous.

Of course, those thieves and murderers must be thrown in jail, and the key thrown away. Of course, those roads and airports must be fixed, and those desks and classrooms built. These are already Herculean labors, to be sure, but our economy needs fixing, too. And it’s in worse repair.

How much worse? Here’s one observation by Ruchir Sharma, whom Mr. Aquino quoted in his Sona as saying: “The Philippines is no longer a joke.” That quote is the title of a section on the Philippines in Sharma’s book “Breakout Nations,” in which he writes, “Consumption accounts for an outrageous 80 percent of GDP, 10 percentage points higher than in the United States, and over 40 percentage points more than in China.” Had Mr. Aquino fixed his attention on this, instead of that left-handed compliment (right-handed insult, if you will) about ourselves being no longer the clown of Asia, he might have realized that our economy is in much deeper “kwan” than the government he had inherited from Arroyo.

Then he might have been challenged enough to use as his yardstick the longer ones all over Sharma’s book. Indonesia, perhaps, which is the latest of all those Asian countries that have overtaken us since our economy was second only to Japan’s in the 1960s. Or Thailand, whose government has always been much more unstable than ours.

Then he might have explained to us that everything we produce in our farms and factories, and all those roads and bridges and condominiums being built, account for only one-fifth of our economy. That’s why we have more sales clerks and waitresses and peddlers than we have farm, factory and construction workers. We may not read that in government stats, but we see them all around us: college graduates filling sundae cones at McDonald’s; licensed nurses serving value meals at Chowking; brawny men, who should be manning machines or building skyscrapers, hawking pirated DVDs from car window to car window.

Then he might have asked us to save more, much more, of what we earn—or what our wives and daughters send home from abroad—so that our banks will have more to lend to farms and factories and construction projects. He might also have asked the central bank what could be done about those interest rates so that our savings would earn more than the pittance they’re earning now, and Congress what could be done about those owners of malls and airlines and breweries owning banks as well. (That’s also in Sharma’s book.)

And we would have done what he asked—not might have, not could have, but would have. We are a people who braved tanks to install his mother in Malacañang. We are a people who defeated Villar’s billions and Estrada’s “masa” with stickers and ribbons and coins—and elected him President with more votes than theirs combined.

Judging from Mr. Aquino’s approval ratings in surveys, we will, still, do what he asks. Trouble is, he’s not asking us to do anything. Because it’s the government that he’s fixated on fixing, I think, and not our economy.

Maybe he really believes his campaign hokum in the last election that eradicating corruption in government will eradicate poverty in our society. Maybe he thinks our economy is too messed up to fix, like that guy searching for his wallet under a lamppost because it’s dark where he actually lost it. Maybe he thinks we should leave everything to him and his magnificent Cabinet.

C’mon now, Mr. President. Even the amazing Spiderman needed the people to help him save their city.

Romeo D. Bohol is a retired advertising copywriter.