RAUL ROCO

1941-2005

When his death was announced, I posted this comment on the Pinoy Exchange forums:

You know, I think he would have won the elections hands down had FPJ not entered the race so he could at least snatch Loren Legarda as his running mate when she bolted Lakas (which was a missed opportunity, as well as not recruiting Sonny Alvarez to his senatorial slate as a guest candidate). I felt sad when his campaign started to lose steam when he got ill and had to go abroad. And I don't think health should be a factor in choosing a leader, remember FDR had polio.

R.I.P. Raul Roco, you're a great man that should have been something else had the right opportunity came.

Here's an interesting editorial from The Philippine Daily Inquirer about one of the greatest Philippine presidents we never had:

Sense of the possible

EX-SENATOR Raul Roco, who passed away on Friday, did not leave the scene like an Old Testament prophet, unhonored in his own country. From his youth, he had received the grateful recognition of the various communities he served, expressed in diverse forms: academic honors, unqualified professional success, an outstanding lawmaking career, untold political capital.

And yet there remains a sense that the country he served did not quite give him the final recognition he deserved. This sense, of course, is based on his two unsuccessful runs for the presidency, on the notion that his defeat was ultimately the nation's loss.

It is worth noting that, in the outpouring of praise from all sides of the political divide, the tributes from the younger politicians have been stamped by a deep imprint of what-might-have-beens. A fellow Bicolano, Rep. Rolando Andaya Jr., said that if history would judge Roco the "best president this country never had, no one will contest such a judgment." At the other end of the political spectrum, Bayan Muna party-list Rep. Teodoro Casino echoed this view: Roco was "probably the most qualified president the country never had."

These are remarkable testimonials, considering that history's list of highly qualified candidates for president includes Claro M. Recto, Raul Manglapus and Jovito Salonga.

They are all the more remarkable coming from the country's younger leaders.

The older members of the political class have not held back on their praise for Roco. But it is in the language used by Andaya, Casiño, et al. that the sense of unfulfilled potential is strongest, and at its most plaintive.

Why is this so?

In part, the tribute is a function of the very language they used; the praise may have been suggested by the phrase.

But the tribute is also a function of their youth; they were not around when Recto and Lorenzo Tañada and Manglapus tilted at the windmills of Philippine politics. Roco's example may have made a stronger impression because it was an experience they lived through.

But in greater part, the tribute is a reflection of Roco's own appeal: He drew the young, understood them, spoke their language.

We do not mean that he spoke in rap or wrote in "textese." We mean that he appealed to the idealism, the sense of the possible, that animates the young. His last campaign theme, offering "new hope," was political sentimentalism; but it was political sentimentalism with a specific demographic in mind.

It helped that his appeal to idealism was backed by a reputation for competence, in his law practice and in government service, and for wit.

These three virtues-idealism, competence, intelligence—all came together in an iconic episode during the Estrada impeachment trial. Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, a former judge, had insinuated that a witness, a young lawyer who had left a job at one law firm for another with lower pay, was somehow in the wrong. "The normal reaction is to accept the higher salary," Santiago sang. Roco used his turn to ask the witness to defend, not only the lawyer on the witness stand, but all lawyers. He asked questions that allowed the witness to say the truth, which is that money was not the only consideration. Then he turned around and smiled: "The law is not a business but a noble profession."

In a sense, he owed everything to that profession. His work ethic was shaped by the brutal realities of lawyering, Philippine-style. As many of those who worked for him have said, he did his homework, and drove himself and his staff hard.

He had his shortcomings, of course. He was not much of a coalition builder; for him, politics was not so much addition as geometry. He believed that a single man with Archimedes' lever could move the world. But in Congress, and in the Senate, and in the Department of Education, the reality is that no lever can ever be long enough.

This shortcoming was felt most in his presidential campaigns, which lacked the network and the resources that a Senate slate of equally impressive candidates would have made available. The outpouring of praise since Friday is thus doubly poignant; if these politicians had supported him then, perhaps, his fate would have been different. Eulogies are wasted on the dead.