Urgent tasks (1)

In other times and in other places, the leaders who stood out and those deeply etched in their people’s memories were generally men who presided over periods of turbulence and war.

In the US, there was Abraham Lincoln who presided over the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson who imagined a world of peace after the slaughter that was the World War I, Roosevelt of the next world war and Truman of the Cold War. In the UK, the stature achieved by Winston Churchill is unparalleled as is that of his French counterpart Charles de Gaulle.

These were men who rallied their nations during moments when everything was on the block, who exceedingly inspired those they led when despair seemed the order of the day. Maybe they were not all extraordinary men. They were perhaps ordinary men who had to lead in extraordinary circumstances.

Others had to construct nations when the very idea of nationhood was threadbare. Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir come to mind. There is the persistent Lee Kuan Yew — so persistent he still speaks to us to this day. In our own history, there is Quezon and Magsaysay.

We have long gone beyond the period when leaders had to govern when the very survival of their nations was at stake, when there was just one idea to fight for and a single ideology to uphold. That was a romantic time when leaders emerged men on horsebacks, rallying the troops and dying in their boots.

Today, democratic leaders might seem duller in comparison with their heroic predecessors. In the preceding century, leaders had to defend sacred ground. In this new century, leaders have to make trains run on time. They preside over a cacophony of voices and attempt to govern a formless mass of micro-constituencies, each with its own complaint and everyone with a well-formed opinion.

The skills for exemplary leadership in today’s digital world are different, although no less heroic. They have to inspire their nations to excel in a borderless world. They have to plan well to enable their people to produce optimally. They have to rise above the din of everyday politics and forge some semblance of a working consensus — even as the point of consensus shifts daily.

In this country, as in many others, people imagine their leader to be a man on horseback who might, with one telling sweep of the sword, cut the roots of our discontent. That expectation is the most frequent source of popular frustration, of mass disaffiliation from the institutions of governance, of a perversely cultivated cynicism that often brings the popular culture at odds with the civic culture required to be functional in the modern world.

In fact, exemplary leadership in our circumstances involves constant management of disparate issues. It requires making a thousand small decisions each day that adds up to palpable achievement in the end. It requires reconciling interests across a thousand lines of fissure. It is a job that cannot be accomplished by grand rhetoric but by grueling, patient and focused work.

The job of President of the Republic of the Philippines is at once draining, exasperating and discombobulating. There will be days when the leader would want throw up his hands and say this nation is simply ungovernable. There will be other days when he will feel he is trying to race in a muddy marsh, with every sort of obstacle thrown his way.

And there will be days when he will be shocked by the realization that he had, frantically, run a full circle and is back where he started. There will be a thousand people to talk to each day and a pile of paper thrown his way each morning. The days will always seem too short for all that needs to be done. He will need to remember a thousand deadlines he had himself set and find a way to exact the results he wanted.

The worst part of this job is that the President cannot quit on it. He just has to keep going and going and going — even when there will be moments when one seems directionless.

Remember the mythology about the man who had to roll a rock up a hill? Well, he has a better job than the President of the Republic. He had but one thing to do and one way of going about doing it.

The President has to make hundreds of decisions each day, each decision with a menu of options and choices that all seem equally unattractive, even distasteful. Yet the decisions need to be made.

The worst part of making all these decisions is that there is no unified quantitative measure for declaring success of failure. Each achievement will have to percolate in political and economic time — and even then might seem to evaporate.

It has been fashionable to try and tar the outgoing administration with the tag “transactional politics.” As a political scientist, the term always struck me as a redundancy. All politics is transactional in the etymological sense of that term. Every political actor deals with an endless cycle of action and counteraction, stimuli and responses.

Only tyrants can think of their actions as having no counteractions. The curse of democratic leadership is that effective leaders need to compromise, cut deals and find win-win solutions to even the most intractable problems.

The challenge for the incoming President is to define goals and milestones clearly and early enough so that there are reference points for all the transactions that will need to be made. These are goals and milestones that cannot be simply cut from the wind. They will have to be an agenda of urgent tasks based on “doables” (to borrow from the awkward language of FVR’s time).

With that agenda of urgent task, we might know, in the boundless universe of things to be done, what is important and what is not.