‘The best president ever’

“The measure of greatness will depend on character, vision, competence, among others.”

Last week, erstwhile Chief of the Philippine National Police and presidential candidate Senator Bato de la Rosa said that President Rodrigo Duterte is the best President ever.

Normally, sitting presidents are not included when evaluating who is the best or worst. It is only when they leave office that they are included. But the Senator is of course entitled to his opinion as we all are. His judgment is hardly surprising.

Still, Senator de la Rosa may have also opened a can of worms. Unlike in the United States wherein there is an academic discipline in the study of presidents, we still do not have an equivalent here or if there is, it is still in its infancy. Because of the numerous presidential scholars that the United States has, it is they who rank their presidents from best to worst.

The closest thing that I have seen here is a TV program by one of our cable TV stations going over how our various presidents governed the country. It is aired in the early hours of the day and unless you are an insomniac, the program is probably not familiar to you. Still, it offers very helpful and insightful materials on the successes and failures of our presidents. In the US, their greatest president is usually a tossup between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, with Washington slightly ahead. Those in the tail end were presidents like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Franklin Pierce. The positioning sometimes changes especially those being adjudged as the worst but not by much.

With us, how should we judge who is the best and worst presidents among our 15 former presidents, 16 if the current president is included? Great deeds after all are often difficult to capture. For example, in the more than 1,000 years of British monarchy, only one monarch is called the great and that is King Alfred. There are two in Russia. Czar Peter the Great and Czarina Catherine the Great.

De la Rosa did not explain why he considers President Duterte as our best president ever.

Finding out who is the best or worst involves a complicated process. The period in our history when a president held office for instance plays an important part. President Emilio Aguinaldo’s time is different from the era of Manuel L. Quezon. Aguinaldo, for instance, failed in his revolutionary war while Quezon succeeded in getting the law passed granting us our independence on July 4, 1946. Had Aguinaldo won his revolutionary war, perhaps he would be the best or greatest president. Quezon, on the other hand, is considered one of our most successful presidents.  Among our postwar presidents, we have Ramon Magsaysay, a man of the masses and beloved by the people. Unfortunately, he did not get to complete his first term. When Ferdinand Marcos was elected in 1965, he promised to make this country great again. He went on to rule for the next 20 years culminating in his ouster in 1986. His 20-year rule reverberates to this day.

When Corazon Aquino became President, she returned the country to democratic rule which is considered her greatest legacy. She refused to run for reelection even when the ban did not apply to her. She passed the torch to President Fidel V. Ramos who came up with his vision of Philippines 2000 which started the country to a sustained economic growth. He was followed by President Joseph Estrada whose term was cut short when Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was catapulted to a nine-year Presidency. The path to economic growth started by Ramos accelerated during her Presidency which was further enhanced during President Benigno Aquino’s time.

President Duterte is now about eight months away from relinquishing his presidency. The judgment on his place in history, however, will have to wait until he leaves office. But even now, I can almost see that his administration will be debated vigorously for many years to come. Among the post-Marcos presidents, he was able to get the nation to march to his kind of tune like a pied piper bringing the country to unchartered territories.

Nonetheless, academic scholars should be able to find his rank among our 16 presidents. That way, the people will have some scientific basis for saying whether a president is the best or the worst. All presidents have their pluses and minuses.

In the end however, the measure of greatness will depend mostly on character, vision, competence and whether a certain president has the most pluses and the least minuses. In the case of President Duterte, it would be interesting to know how scholars will eventually rank him. Will he be the best as de la Rosa believes or end up being something else? Let’s wait and see.