Ramos rides again - WHY AND WHY NOT by Nelson A. Navarro

Fidel Ramos, you could always tell, never wanted to leave Malacañang. From Day One of his presidency in June 1992, it was evident that he thought of the Cory Constitution’s provision for a one-term presidency as the one definitive impediment to Philippine progress. But like his predecessor Cory Aquino, he had no choice but to play along with the fiction of no-reelection, all the while trying to lay the premise for its scrapping by a friendly constitutional convention sometime down the line.

The Man from Asingan was a bit too clever by half in ‘secretly’ encouraging a rather dubious and untried "People’s Initiative" to pave the way for his cherished second term after 1998 as the nation’s chief executive. Mrs. Aquino, her own hele-hele bago quiere maneuvers to get another term having gone awry, wouldn’t hear of this Ramosian heresy.

Joined by her inseparable political twin, Jaime Cardinal Sin, the two EDSA franchise-holders created such a firestorm of protest against the PIRMA’s "People’s Initiative" that the embattled Ramos just had to back down in shame. More reluctantly and resentfully, to be sure.

It need not be added that Ramos’ forced exit into history created the major premise for the widely popular but politically underrated Joseph Estrada’s ascent to the presidency. Ramos all but assured such a political catastrophe for the then-ruling Lakas-NUCD by designating Joe de Venecia, the quintessential traditional politician or trapo, as his chosen successor. In the resulting 9-candidate battle, with Mrs. Aquino putting up her own candidate, all Estrada had to do was to flash his movie-star charms and pass himself off as the great friend of the adoring masses. He, of course, had taipans like Lucio Tan and Danding Cojuangco bankrolling his campaign.

De Venecia went down in flames but not before taking on Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, another presidential wannabe, as running mate. Little Gloria emerged from the debris as Estrada’s odd Vice President and Lakas-NUCD’s putative leader. Yet it was always clear that Ramos and De Venecia, along with the shadowy cabal of Joe Almonte, would continue to pull the strings from behind a once-formidable party-in-power humbled into opposition status.

The question was: How much and how long Ramos could stay in the shadows and stay out of the hair not only of Estrada but of Little Gloria. Given the man’s penchant for unsolicited advice and the frenzied travel schedule he kept to the far corners of the earth, behaving as if he was still President, Ramos could not help but offend his successor. Or at the very least, earn the enmity of Estrada’s panicky handlers.

Each time Ramos spoke, some observers noted, it was as if he was calling attention to Estrada’s rank incompetence or failure to grasp the complexities of running a nation. Anxious to keep Ramos in his proper place, Estrada took an obvious shine for Mrs. Aquino who seemed to be flattered by all the attention coming from a man she and Cardinal Sin had openly regarded as most unfit for the highest office in the land.

Some quarters noted that Mrs. Aquino, due to her Japanese business connections (board of directors, Sanyo Corporation) and her family’s wish to develop Hacienda Luisita into a major industrial estate, could only have been vulnerable to friendship offered by the nation’s uncrowned monarch.

The Aquino connection certainly helped Estrada blunt the more prickly criticisms hurled by Ramos, especially around the time of the BW insider-trading scandal. A main beef of Estrada was that Perfecto Yasay, the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman who blew the whistle on the President’s friends, just happened to be a very close associate of Ramos. Yasay’s case could only make Estrada paranoid about other Ramos operatives planted deep in his administration or in his office in Malacañang itself.

More annoying was what Estrada suspected to be a Ramosian conspiracy bent on unleashing the media against the hapless administration, peppering it with unrelenting attacks on Estrada’s personal life and alleged corrupt activities of his cronies. Many times, Estrada got enraged enough to directly attack Ramos. Always poker-faced and determined to avoid frontal collisions that favor the man in power, Ramos tended to keep his cool.

As for Little Gloria, the basic problem was Ramosian tutelage and how a sitting Vice President like her, a mere heart beat from the presidency, would take to dictation, no matter how friendly, coming from a voice from the past. If Ramos and De Venecia ever assumed the lady was some meek and obedient puppet, they were soon proven way off the mark.

Lurking in Little Gloria’s mind, to be sure, was the suspicion that all the goading coming from Ramosian circles, to the effect of sharpening her claws against an administration she has chosen to serve as a member of the Cabinet, can only work against her self-interest. That Estrada and Little Gloria have been forced into each other’s political arms fits rather well into the emerging Ramosian restoration scenario. Who else in the marginalized opposition can take on Little Gloria in 2004? I give you one guess.

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Nelson A. Navarro’s e-mail address: <[email protected]>