Who wants to be a lame duck?

Will President Benigno Aquino III come out of the May 13 elections a roaring lion or a chastened lame duck?

Perhaps the answer all comes down to partisan alignments or the pious wishes of ordinary folks like me who only wish the best of a bad situation for our country.

If you can believe the so-called ruling Liberals, Team P-Noy will make a clean 12-0 senatorial sweep and recast the president all over again as the conquering hero of 2010. Recent poll surveys conducted by SWS and Pulse Asia show the president’s high ratings as relatively untarnished by the Sabah fiasco and the smoldering smuggling scandal. Not even the Kris-James brouhaha appears to have backfired on the brother who prudently kept quiet.

The United Nationalist Alliance (UNA), hardly an opposition force, does not exactly predict disaster for the LP-led ticket nor a sharp personal rebuke for the president. But its drumbeaters insist they will win a good number of senate seats and spring big surprises in key provinces like Pangasinan, Cavite and Cebu.

What’s more likely is that the muddled political alliances of the past three years will be reflected in equally muddled election results.

Team P-Noy and UNA will both win some and lose some, with neither scoring a spectacular, much less smashing victory to alter the existing political equation.

Perish the thought of 12-0 as a Marcosian or Corazonian pipe dream at a time when this administration hardly commands a monopoly of raw power or moral ascendancy.   

Only Frank Drilon holds out the LP fantasy of total victory with a straight face. UNA’s Three Kings of Erap Estrada, Jejomar Binay and Johnny Ponce Enrile have not condescended to turn bravado into an empty, if pathetic, boast.

The inconvenient truth is that LP is not exactly the formidable juggernaut that the KBL was for Ferdinand Marcos. It masquerades as the administration party largely because of the president’s huge personal victory in 2010.

Aquino III’s running mate, Mar Roxas, Mr. Liberal himself, lost to Binay in a split victory that guaranteed the emergence of a divided political house in the very heart of the presidency.

It was NoyBi (Aquino and Binay), a mixed ticket of old allies dating back to martial law days, that actually swept to power, much to the chagrin of Roxas and his followers who have since engaged in protracted war within the administration to completely pull Aquino to their side.

Everybody knows that Aquino is far from torn between two lovers; he is in bed with both politicians and this political ménage à trois explains the grand, if deliberate confusion that cannot yet be resolved, probably all the way to the next presidential election in 2016.

Regardless of the actual body count this month, nothing will be settled in so far as the rival Binay and Roxas groups are concerned. As the man who wields the baton in this dissonant orchestra, Aquino will simply coast along until either or both of the combatants makes or is forced into a decisive move that will break the impasse. The muddle serves the president’s purposes, so why should he tempt the fates?

This comes down to what some analysts calls his inability to exploit a bizarre situation that Manuel Quezon or Ferdinand Marcos would have jumped on to promote a truly personal agenda to alter the Constitution’s draconian presidential term limits.

Call it the peril of lame duckhood, a fate worse than death or assassination for any president worth his or her salt. Whether mad with power or reform-driven, a president cannot afford to have his power whittled down at mid-term. Once the sign is up that he cannot control what happens in the next three years, everybody will slowly desert the incumbent and build bridges to the possible successor.

Nothing erodes a president’s power faster than the certainty that he cannot extend his term. He will become a howling irrelevance and might as well resign or spend what remains of his term enjoying the perks of power like going on state visits or foreign vacations.

Quezon in 1935 saw this unacceptably dreadful fate coming when he became the nation’s first elected president, although of an American colony and not an independent republic.

Although the 1935 Constitution was written by Quezon loyalists, they were afflicted by political correctness that dictated that the new republic ought to be dictator-free. A six-year presidential term with no reelection was put in, much to the silent chagrin of the man who from Day One plotted to amend it when he became the first Filipino to occupy Malacañang, the seat of power of the colonial pro-consuls of the land.

To call Quezon an uncrowned king or ill-disguised dictator was not uncommon in his day. He was an autocrat and he called all the shots. Even as Senate president in 1933, he made it clear who was boss over the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Law. He sacked the Osrox bloc — Sergio Osmeña, his senate deputy, and Manuel Roxas, the assembly speaker — and secured a rewritten independence bill from Washington tailored to his wishes.

The beauty of it all was that Osmeña and Roxas sheepishly came back to the fold and did Quezon’s bidding during the commonwealth period (1935-45), and well into the future years of the emerging republic.

What rankled Quezon was the very thought that his six-year term would assure that he would no longer be president when the Philippines, as promised by the Tydings-McDuffie Law, would become an independent republic in 1946. A new president would have to be elected in 1941 and it would be either Osmeña or Roxas to claim the honor Quezon coveted most of all.

Quezon’s biographer, Carlos Quirino, provides the hidden story behind the President’s astute move to amend the constitution before the 1941 elections. He proposed a historic bargain lapped up by the obedient legislature: to exchange his six-year term with a four-year term with one reelection. Two other amendments were added to complete this grand bargain: to scrap the unicameral assembly for the old bicameral legislature (Senate and House) and to create the Commission on Elections as an independent body.

Under the arrangement, according to the biographer, Quezon would still be president in 1946, take a break from power after a year or so by having his vice president warm his seat and then be eligible in the next election for another eight years. He would, in effect, hold power up to the mid-1950s.

Quezon could call the shots indefinitely because all the 24 senators elected in 1941 were personally handpicked by him. Among them was Claro Recto, number one, and Manuel Roxas, number two, in the Senate results, along with Paredes, Madrigal, Quirino (Elpidio), Garcia, Rodriguez, Cuenco and all those who would be the top honchos in the postwar government.

The irony, of course, was that Quezon was by then a dying man and he passed away in exile in 1944, succeeded by Osmeña, his vice president. Roxas would rebel against Osmeña and, with General MacArthur’s machinations, become the first president of the republic. Roxas would suddenly die of a heart attack in 1948 and the “accidental” president, Quirino, would plunge the country into a series of crippling crises that remains unabated to this day. Such was Quezon’s dark legacy.

What does Quezon’s long-forgotten maneuver have to do with the second President Aquino’s present dilemma?

Nothing short of a terrible reminder of the six-year non-renewable term that had earlier tormented the Man from Baler. The original and self-serving Quezonian argument to scuttle that limitation has echoed down from the 1930s: six years is too short for a good president and too long for a bad president.

Quezon got his wish of a four-year term with another four years as reelected president. From Roxas to Marcos or the six succeeding presidencies (1946-1973), the operating principle was for an incumbent president to win a reelection, much like the American president. Not one succeeded because of death or electoral defeat until Marcos broke the reelection jinx by declaring martial law in 1972 and ruling as a dictator.President Cory Aquino, when her turn to be president came following the 1986 EDSA revolt, was plagued by the same spirit of political correctness and, like Quezon, was unable to prevent being trapped into a course that could only lead to lame duck status halfway to the end of her term.

Cory’s term, to put it mildly, was a roller-coaster ride of high promises and disappointing results that culminated in massive power brownouts and a near-restoration of the Marcos forces in 1992.

Her four successors would be bedeviled by the ticking time bomb that was their own six-year terms. They knew, or know, in the case of her son, that unless they scored big in mid-term elections, it would be downhill for the remaining three years. Hence, the specter of constitutional amendment, always ill-disguised as focused on economic issues, but really zeroed on giving the president a crack at another term in the Quezon tradition.

It was said that Cory Aquino wanted a second term but cringed at the thought of slugging it out, given her diminished popularity after a year in office. She wanted to be “crowned” or run unopposed for a second term and because this was not in the cards, she wisely stepped down from power.

Her anointed successor, Fidel Ramos, came in with 23.4 percent of the vote and took time strengthening his minority position. By the time he made noises about another term via a constitutional amendment, even Coryistas saw the danger and emasculated the FIRMA movement that Ramos all but disowned in the end.

Erap Estrada simply had no chance to put his mid-term strategy into effect; he was ousted by the EDSA II revolt masterminded by Cory, Ramos and Cardinal Sin who installed Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the vice president, for the remainder of Erap’s term.

Arroyo for her part allegedly rigged the 2004 presidential race against the movie idol Fernando Poe Jr., only to harvest wide public derision that culminated in a Supreme Court decision ruling out her final gambit of a constituent assembly that would have granted her the constitutional remedy denied her predecessors.

President P-Noy comes to full circle in facing the albatross of lame duckhood. Behind the cherished 12-0 senatorial sweep appears to be the fantasy of altering the Senate balance of power to give him a reasonable chance of a constitutional change in his favor.

Until recently, the mathematics of power seemed to support the dreamy assumptions of his ardent supporters. This was so after the Corona impeachment showed that the third branch of government would obey the wishes of Malacañang just like the other half of the legislature, the House of Representatives, that has always been assumed to be in the pocket of whoever was president.

Only the Senate appeared to be in the way of the second Aquino presidency cutting the Gordian knot of power.  Arroyo couldn’t get the two-thirds of the senate that she could surely secure from the House. The whole question today is whether, after the coming elections, P-Noy has the senate in the bag as well as a reliable majority in the Supreme Court to make sure there will be no hitches.

On both counts, P-Noy may be a bit short of targets. The complete senatorial sweep is out of the question. But even if Team P-Noy wins some nine of 12 seats, what is the guarantee that Legarda, Escudero and Poe, the “independents,” will dance to his music? Or that the Nacionalista Party bloc of Cayetano, Villar and possibly Trillanes will do the same?

More than ever, it is said, the Senate tends to be a body of 24 prima donnas who all consider themselves presidential material. Unlike the US Senate that is composed of two senators elected from each of the 50 states, Filipino senators are elected by a national vote and their popularity can quickly be ascertained compared to the president. In other words, top-ranking senators with higher ambitions may not be disposed to grant presidents a free pass without exacting the proverbial pound of flesh.

In the absence of newly elected senators coming out strongly in support of President Aquino’s purported plans to amend the Constitution, the pendulum could swing back to the men or women who are most likely to be his successor in 2016.

Will it be the long-declared candidates Binay or Roxas? How about potential challengers like Legarda, Escudero, Cayetano or even Estrada, assuming he wins big as mayor of Manila?

Not to be ignored are long-shot candidates like Sonny Belmonte, the House speaker, and businessman Manny Pangilinan, both of whom have been making ominous sounds from the sidelines and with formidable resources to match.

Indeed, the Battle of 2016 will not take too long to be in full swing after the May 13 results are known.

There are some caveats that could complicate the situation:

1. The rumblings about possible PCOS or automated cheating that may be exaggerated because the consequences could only be disastrous for the P-Noy regime.

2. The upcoming Bangsamoro deal that may plunge Mindanao into further chaos.

3. The volatile economic outlook that’s beclouded by hot money outrunning bricks-and-mortar investments.

All these factors have to be kept in mind pending a clearer signal about where P-Noy stands in the unfolding political drama. Will he go for broke and pursue constitutional change in the face of a vastly changing situation that is not necessarily working in his favor? Will he shift to legacy mood and coast along to a safe landing as some of his intimate friends are suggesting?

The one thing we can say about the man is that he appears to be unpredictable as ever — a man who came out of the blue to become president upon his sainted mother’s death and who, by jailing Arroyo and chopping down Corona, displayed extraordinary gall or command of power, depending on how he is viewed.

Being a lame duck may or may not be up this president’s alley, but it stares him in the face unless he does something dramatic — and very soon — to avoid or alter what could be a most unpleasant destiny ahead of him.