All the Presidents’ man

One of the things you get for being a journeyman is how fate blows you into the path of jobs that range from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Like anyone else, my share of forgettable jobs were mixed with unforgettable ones.

Dreary work interspersed with stints that found me working not with top corporate honchos but the nation’s literal big dogs themselves. The leader of the land, the top kahuna who sits in Malacanang.

This was how my vagrant career led me to work for four out of our last six presidents.

Not as a bigwig, mind you, just a faceless cog in the insignificant but vital bureaucratic wheel.

It was in those intermittent years that I got to see how even if each of them vastly differed from the others they still, somehow, share certain similarities.

My itinerant political work started when my fledgling stint as a provincial correspondent and lowly stringer for the foreign wires, snagged me my first campaign for a provincial politico.

It was the first elections held after EDSA 1, a rite of passage trawling for votes in the dirty and dangerous informal warrens of Tacloban City, the kind of place where the votes are richer and the politics are at their most lethal. Indeed, it was a time of ideals and flying polemics. A turning of a page from an old regime to a new one. But, in the dark alleys of Tacloban’s urban poor, national politics took a back seat to the daily bouts of survival among the city’s slum dwellers. I thought political work would spare me its enticements when I decamped from the boondocks to the big city and the newsroom of a national newspaper. But the more riveting world of national politics beckoned.

As the 90’s came to a close, I got a taste of my first national political spadework working for my first president. An insignificant fly on the wall perhaps, but an earnest functionary, observant and imbibing both the predictable and the sublime.

I started to see that every presidential campaign elected the candidate who was good at projecting himself as the incumbent’s antipode. This was true especially for candidates who were good at leveraging the media’s portraiture of their candidacies and then clinching the vote through that image especially with the masa.

So there I was in my younger self, wet in the ears, during the heady days and last years of Fidel V. Ramos, or “Tabako,” or simply FVR to those who worked directly, or indirectly, for him.

A breezy guy and our only real Pollyanna president. His genial and sunny persona helping lay the foundation that would later spur our steady progress as a rising nation during the terms of his subsequent successors.

I recall one long night of political events and us young party bucks being awakened from our stupor by the loud sound of a tinkling glass and saw the tireless FVR rapping on his glass of water to resume a meeting that had stretched out into the wee hours.

That was how we saw him, both with a sense of awe and wonder. A president with a funny bone and a stout spirit.

The short term of President Erap Estrada was an interregnum that led to a short stint during the latter half of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s incumbency.

GMA, Ate Glo to media, or just Ma’am to her inner circle and the countless unknown functionaries that used to work for her. GMA’s leadership was long and hapless but it was under her, and FVR, that the country’s nascent economic fundamentals were forged and formed.

The consummate politico, GMA was the model many Pinay national politicians tried to emulate. She was both accessible and reticent at the same time especially when something tested her patience.

In a presidential trip to Abra I watched her as she kept pacing the holding room because the regional peace and order program organized by her national security adviser was running late. It turned out that the tardiness was due to some contretemps between her regional concerns’ team and the advance unit from the National Security Council whose fallout left her National Security Adviser in the lurch in nearby Vigan.

GMA’s fretfulness can be likened to the pensiveness of her nemesis President Benigno Simeon Aquino III. President Noynoy during one occasion excused himself for a few minutes from the ongoing tedium to take a drag on his beloved cigarette.

What Noynoy Aquino did in the 2010 elections, winning as the anti-thesis of GMA, Rodrigo Duterte replicated in 2016. Digong positioned himself as a rube and counterpoint to the earnestness of PNoy and his would be successors.

Whereas Aquino focused his energies on his campaign for good governance, Duterte spent his political capital on his campaign to rid the streets of drug peddlers and drug addicts.

And a mere two years out of the dark days of Covid and the economic uncertainties of the pandemic, came a turning of a new leaf. After Digong’s irrepressible and hectoring presidential style came the relaxed and engaging nature of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.

I surmise historians will look at 2022 and say it was a turning point from the funk and fearful six years before it. A dawning of a new brighter chapter.

This is because President Bongbong Marcos seems to be the exact opposite of his immediate predecessor. He sets goals rather than sows fear. He is conscientious and is not overbearing.

He is proving to be what we expect a president should be—dignified, humane, and hardworking.

And in all the years under the reflected shadows of these presidents, my grizzled eye unfiltered by affiliation or ideological baggage, I see that each of them both diverges and converges in their personas and styles.

This is why in my years working as a nameless functionary for the Numero Uno in that place by the Pasig River, I’ve learned to doubt the motives of the rabble-rouser and the nitpicker.

Why the sougraping? Why the mudslinging? I ask myself as I look at the current president, from my insignificant vantage point, and see that while President Bongbong Marcos is very much his own man he also embodies the virtues of those who came before him.

Although he uncannily sounds like his father, I see that he can stand on his own and that he shares some of the good traits of the other presidents I somehow was able to served: e.g. the economic pragmatism of GMA, the patriotism of Noynoy Aquino, and the Panglossian optimism of FVR.

President Bongbong Marcos punches in daily to do his herculean share of work we expect a president to do. Going to the people to provide service and confer with them with no let up. Being an eloquent voice rather than someone who spouts fear and uncertainty in a time of too much white noise, distractions, and deceit from within and without. And for showing us that we can all be patriots.