Yolanda also killed presidential ambitions

I have no doubt in my mind that when Interior and Local Government secretary Mar Roxas decided to ride out supertyphoon Yolanda in Tacloban, he had no inkling about the kind of devastation the monster would bring. And I don't blame him for his misappreciation. All of us erred in this regard.

Roxas blew into Tacloban ahead of the storm with the same intent that he has been blowing into almost every other crisis situation across the length and breadth of this nation. And that is to do good and to be of help, I must concede. But also never, never without any motive.

For it is always possible, as it is clearly possible with Roxas, to do good and be of service and still reap the rewards -- in fact this more than the other -- which in his case is none other than a successful run in 2016 for the presidency.

To convince people of his capacity to lead, especially in times of crisis, Roxas determined that he has to plant his boots on the ground. In the case of Tacloban, he felt he had to be in the eye of the storm. But like everyone else, he had no idea this was going to be a different and very uncooperative storm.

And so, when Roxas surveyed the destruction and realized no man alive could single-handedly make sense of the situation, he did the next best thing. He started looking for scapegoats, a talent he learned so well from his boss, Noynoy Aquino.

Right now there is an ongoing exchange of words between Roxas and Tacloban City Mayor Alfred Romualdez. It appears, according to Romualdez, that Roxas had been reluctant to take charge of the situation in Tacloban after the storm and instead started blaming local officials for their "slowness" as first responders.

But of course there were no first responders in the strongest storm ever to make a landfall in all of recorded history. Packing 300 kilometers per hour winds and generating a tsunami-like storm surge measuring 15 feet, everybody became a victim.

The test of the moment, therefore, stood right before the eyes of Roxas. The moment he had long been waiting for waited to be seized. But Roxas was simply not up to the challenge. He simply wilted at the sight of the destruction.

Unable to push himself despite being the highest official of the land on the ground at the time, Roxas started blaming Romualdez for not having prepared enough for the destruction. Reacting to Romualdez's plea to take charge, Roxas instead asked the Tacloban mayor to write a letter outlining his inability to function.

He cautioned Romualdez to proceed with caution because he was a Romualdez and the president was an Aquino, thus injecting the bad blood politics between two warring political families in a situation that called for anything but politicking.

In fairness to Roxas, nobody has corroborated the exchange between him and Romualdez on the ground in Tacloban. It is all a matter of being Romualdez's word against that of Roxas. Sadly for Roxas, Romualdez's account is very specific and necessitates far more than just a broad denial by Roxas.

If, as Roxas seems to insist, everything was all up to first responders -- meaning the local officials of Tacloban -- then I have but one very simple and direct question to ask: "What the heck then was Roxas doing in Tacloban?"

Why did Roxas have to fly hundreds of kilometers from the relative safety of Metro Manila, spending huge amounts of public money to be able to do so, if all that he as a national official is able to do about the destruction is blame Tacloban officials for their inability to fend for themselves?

If that was the best Roxas could do in a situation like that, he should just have stayed home and watched CNN and learn something about storms from its top caliber meteorologists. Had he done so, he probably could have salvaged what remains of his presidential ambition.