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Sunday, February 5, 2012

Why Presidential Grand Designs Get Derailed

PROBLEMS IN THE PALACE

Why Presidential Grand Designs Get Derailed

By Mariano O. Patalinjug

THE PRESIDENTIAL THRONE is certainly not a place for those who are weak in flesh and spirit. Neither is it a place for the timorous, the onion-skinned, or the simple-minded who can see only black or white. He who sits there must at least have the qualities of Solomon, Batman and Machiavelli all rolled into one.

The President of the Republic occupies center stage in our society. He is at once the focus of our people's hopes and dreams and the rallying point of the nation. In a pluralistic society, with its diversity and its raging conflicts, the President is expected to create order out of chaos. He is expected to know where the land of promise lies, and lead his people there--quickly and with a sure hand.

To enable him to carry his burdens, the Constitution gives the President vast and even awesome powers. And yet, though he must rule with firmness, he too must avoid being despotic--or at least not seem to be. He must observe the demands of the rule of law--that vast legal and moral shield our society has set up to protect itself from arbitrariness and wantonness on the part of its leaders.

In a free and open society, the President's actions are exposed mercilessly to public view. And since many if not most of his actions are bound to please some people, and displease others, the President is a hero to some and a villain to others. He is praised and denounced at the same time.

It may truly be said that the President sits uneasily and precariously in the storm's fickle eye--from the moment when, flushed with victory, he delivers his soaring inaugural address, and right up to the moment when, the people having chosen a new leader, shattered and forlorn he walks out of the glittering presidential palace and back into the uncertain twilight of obscurity.

Viewed this way the presidency would seem to be a very difficult job. It is.

Who among our Presidents, since the Republic was established in 1946, has come closest to fulfilling the high expectations of our people?

There is no easy answer. Each of our past presidents, given the specific problems of his tenure, had his own grand design, and it is only fair that his performance should be tested against this grand design.

On the basis of this criterion, it could be said that not one proved to be a roaring success; and not one proved to be a resounding failure either. Roxas, Osmena, Quirino, Magsaysay, Garcia and Macapagal--all of them had their share of both limited success and limited failure, with the difference between them perhaps only a difference in the ratio of success to failure.

What is certain is that each one of them, in his own way, pointed to the land of promise. He heaved and he puffed--but the country never got there.

We are still very much where we started out in 1946. It is true that we have made some gains in a few vital aspects of national development. But the old and nagging problems are still with us--and we have new ones besides.

Widespread poverty, unemployment, underemployment, underproduction, glaring inequalities in income with very few very rich and very many very poor, lack of capital, graft and corruption in the government, soaring prices, agricultural bias in economic development, school crises, bureaucratic ineptitude, population explosion and the threat of revolution--the old vocabulary of social and economic ills is still very much with us, indeed. And now, in addition, we have to contend with the mounting breakdown of law and order.

The reality does not fit the vision. The shoddy deed cowers in shame before the beautiful word.

WHAT is the explanation for the failure of our past Presidents to make our country reach the beautiful land of milk and honey? There are many explanations which a searching analysis could advance.

These explanations relate basically, first, to the nature and dimensions of our society's goals; second, to the resources and means available to our society to achieve its goals; and, third, to the wide gamut of conflicting pressures and claims seeking expression and dominance in our society.

On the campaign trail, the presidential candidate usually lambastes his opponents. He pictures them as the villains responsible for any and all things that have gone wrong in the country. He then presents himself as the new Messiah, the man the country needs to get it out of the rut and into the land of plenty.

If elected President, what exactly will he do?

He has all the details ready. He will eliminate poverty from the face of the land. He will give land to the landless, jobs to the jobless. He will send the grafters and crooks to jail. He will stop the spiral in prices. There will be rice and corn and clothing and shelter for all--at prices all can afford. The children will have their schools. He will boost agricultural production. Industrialization, the real answer to the problem of economic stagnation, will be pushed. He will find all the money needed to carry out his economic and social development program. But, he assures his listeners, he will not impose new taxes on the people--they are heavily taxed as they are. Every citizen--the weak and the mighty, the poor and the rich--is entitled to equal justice, and all will get equal justice.

The candidate of course gets elected. With the help of a brain trust, hurriedly he reduces his long list of promises into some kind of formal program. And then, to the sound of deafening applause, he delivers his inaugural address.

He is now in the storm's fickle eye.

By now the President has picked some of the members of his cabinet. One wonders, however, why the man picked this one (a lame duck), or that one (a mediocre fellow by any decent standard)--or the other two. What one does not know is that long before election time, these four cabinet posts had already been "promised"--horse-traded is the correct term.

Horse-trading continues furiously behind the scenes for the other cabinet posts. Everyone who feels entitled to a big reward comes forward, jockeys for position and makes his claim. The corridors of power boil over.

Pressure on the new President mounts, some bearable, others not so. With each official announcement of a new appointment, an ominous rumble follows. Obviously, the new man cannot please everybody. With everybody he pleases, he displeases possibly at least ten. He tries to mollify the latter with a promise of appointment to other juicy posts. Compromises are struck. Finally, after all the sound and fury behind the scenes--a very taxing exercise--the President's cabinet is complete. One notices easily that it is a weak cabinet.

But the President's big headache have just started. There is still the more taxing and more crucial exercise of deciding who gets what important post in both houses of Congress--and this is true even when the President enjoys a majority in Congress Here one finds the proud claimants to power unabashedly jockeying for position. Action draws reaction. One hears the ominous rumbling and grumbling. The horse-trading is on again. The President temporizes. He compromises. Some of the claimants are pleased. Others are not;these go into tantrums and sulk. Some wounds are left to fester. Finally, the Congress is organized.

THE PRESIDENT then presents his program to Congress. There is nothing new or surprising to it; it is more or less a rehash or a more elaborate and detailed version of his inaugural address. It is the country's vehicle to the land of milk and honey. It is the grand design.

One is immediately struck by the program's bigness and boldness. With its proliferation of ambitious projects and exaggerated statistical projections the program certainly carries the stamp of Big Think.

But where, one asks, is he going to get all the money needed to get the whole program going? Yes, domestic and foreign sources of financing are spelled out clearly; but supposing the large amounts are not raised, or are raised only partly, what happens to the grand design? The answer: it goes kaput!

We have had a surfeit of these programs which went kaput--simply because they were much, much too ambitious. Through the years, we have been acting as though for us the sky and our imagination were the only limits to national goals and ambitions. Our leaders have been promising us the moon and the stars--the works.

But there certainly is a limit to the number of big things we can do simultaneously, and this is dictated by the effective amount of resources and talent which we can muster at a given time. We have simply been trying to do too many things at the same time. We have wasted valuable resources spread much too thinly over so wide an area. The result is that where we could have done quite well with a few objectives at a time, we have really nothing much to show for all our heroic exertions all this time. We have been reckless. We have been suffering from delusions of grandeur.

The new President discovers soon enough that controlling the bureaucracy to a point where he is able to channel its resources and energies purposefully, and make it carry the clear stamp of his tenure, is easier said than done. The expedient of issuing a flurry of executive orders does not produce results. Nobody in the bureaucracy really gets awed. The President is stymied.

Made up mainly of established autonomous units pursuing objectives and exercising power and authority granted by the Congress, the bureaucracy is a hard nut to crack. To make it respond to new stimulus, to make it move in new directions, it is not enough that the President place his own men in top positions within the bureaucracy. As he finds the whole structure of bureaucracy--unresponsive to change, unyielding, ossified--so, in lesser degrees, will his own men find the constituent units.

And his own men also discover soon enough that it is almost impossible to drive the misfits, the grafters and the crooks, out of office, who happen to be civil service eligibles, out of office. It is one thing to know that a government functionary is a misfit, a grafter or a crook; it is quite another thing to muster the kind of evidence needed to kick him out of his position and into jail. This is not to mention the protection that the fellow may secure from an influential politico--in case he finds himself in hot water. And so, most of misfits, the grafters and the crooks stay.

Overcome by a sense of time swiftly passing, and coming to terms finally with the fact that he cannot completely place his personal stamp on the tradition-bound bureaucracy, the President makes do with what is possible. He has to deliver the goods--and the bureaucracy is his main instrument.

Where formal channels do not yield anticipated results, the President improvises. He bypasses those formal channels and creates his own informal channels. He sets up ad hoc bodies to do specific tasks. He recommends to Congress the creation of one office or another--thus adding to the barnacled, gargantuan structure.

Through these and other devices, the President makes the bureaucracy at least go through the motions. Depending on the qualifications of his own men who run the various units, one sees some units actually moving and doing something; others are deep in the old sticky rut and making any ripple at all in the vast ocean of the President's grand design.

AFTER the first hundred days of the new administration, the press, or rather that sector of the press which has not been bought, opens up like Montgomery of al Alamein. It minces no words. Its big guns roar and their roaring rends the air and jars the presidential palace. All of a sudden, questionable contracts and official wrongdoing are splashed all over the front pages; they fill the air. Presidential conduct of the nation's business becomes the subject of critical scrutiny--and it is almost always found wanting.

The President reacts in typical fashion. He pleads for understanding. He asks for just a little more time to deliver on his promises. He rationalizes. He creates committees to investigate official wrongdoing, promising to punish the guilty. Then somebody close to the President--a rah-rah boy probably--suggests that it might be a good idea to place some more newspapermen on the government payroll--and the harassed President quickly agrees.

But the big guns of the press are not to be silenced. On the other hand, having drawn presidential blood, their attack rises to a crescendo--and it goes on right to the close of the President's term.

The opposition in Congress has not been idle all this time. They have gone through the President's legislative proposals with a fine-toothed comb. They tear many of these to pieces. This one is nothing but a thinly-veiled vote-buying gimmick to ensure the President's reelection, they say. That one will solve only the symptoms and not the real cause of the problem. This one will establish a new office--but with the treasury in bad shape, where will the money come from? And so on and so forth.

The President, himself once a member of Congress, understands. He knows that the opposition is there to oppose--and at time to obstruct. The opposition naturally does not want the President to be a roaring success--why, he might just get reelected!

What piques the President, however, is that some senators of his own party have failed to come to his defense. They just sit there, apparently enjoying the show. And others, also of his party, have actually been taking potshots at him.

The President calls the congressional leaders to a breakfast conference in the Palace. The debates on this and that measures, he says, have dragged on long enough. It is time these measures were passed. The leaders bluntly tell him what the price for early passage is. There is some haggling, but finally the President yields. He dips his hand into the patronage bag, and pays the price. Politics, after all, is the art of the possible.

Congress eventually passes a few of the controversial measures. But in their final form, the bills are watered-down versions of the original proposals. In the President's view, these are not what one calls "happy compromises." Depending on how severely a bill has been mangled, the President has two choices: he either signs it, or vetoes it.

THE WHOLE political process may be viewed within the context of individual and group pressures which move upward--from the barrios, to municipalities, to congressional districts, to provinces, to the government departments, to Congress, and right up to the presidential palace. As the pressures travel upward, they balloon and burst upon the center of power with the force of a whirlwind.

Since many of these pressures cannot be satisfied at lower or intermediate levels--a characteristic flaw of our highly centralized system--it is the President who carries the major burden. And so we have the sorry spectacle of a President attending to a thousand and one details which ought to have been decided at lower levels. He is continually harassed and harangued, and is thus robbed of the time he could otherwise spend on his grand design. He also disappoints many people. He makes many enemies--among these former friends.

Part of the pressure from below is absorbed by Congress. This gives rise to many legislative acts which may not only not have any relation whatsoever to the grand design, but in many cases may actually thwart or derail it. But this circumstance is but a reflection of the pluralistic nature of our society, with its conflicting pressures and claims. It is the working out of the democratic political process--in our country. It is also the bane of the President. For all such bills eventually land in his lap--and again he finds himself buffeted by the winds of political pressure.

Given these many serious problems, and the realities surrounding the President, one gets an idea of the nature and strength of the forces at work which give rise to political Messiahs and which have thwarted or derailed the grand designs of the past.

And one who is not too partisan finds it perhaps easier to sympathize with the man who, after four bruising years in the storms's fickle eye, finally leaves the glittering presidential palace, shattered and forlorn.

We have before our eyes
Here in this life also a Sisyphus
In him who seeketh of the populace
The rods, the axes fell, and evermore
Retires a beaten and a gloomy man.
-Lucretius

*****
[This article was published in the Philippines Free Press issue of October 26, 1968.]

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