The kind of President we need

Title

Creator

Mencias, Benito

Language

English

Source

Philippine Educator, XII (3) August 1957

Year

1957

Subject

Presidents

Attitude (Psychology)

Public opinion on presidential candidates

Presidential elections

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

The Kind of President We Need WELL, thev've nominated Garcia and Yulo and shall ha\'e pro:::laimed Manahan by the time you read this. There are two other candidates in this race -Recto and an ex-judge with a sense of drama by the name of Antonio Quirino. All five gentlemen are running with one thought. To win. Of course, as in 1953, you'll want to be where you can see them strain their muscles. After all, this is a spectacle which happens only once in four years. But watch their smoke. The cinder might get in your eye. The track is the entire country, not just the imi;ortant parts of it. Garcia and Yulo are planning cross-country drive'> and apparently are looking at the race this way. All along Manahan has been behaving as 1 hough this is the general idea. You can depend on Recto to get the jump on these other guys if that can be managed. As for Tony Quirino, he'd be crazy not to cover as much ground as he can. What this amounts to is the likelihood of each of these candidates showing up in town between now and November for the usual oratory before the folks. This ought to be good. It should give you a chance to see the candidates in person, hear them talk, size them up. Nothing like personal contact, I say, to help the voter make his choice. But precisely for this reason ·we'll have to be on our guard. It's very easy to be taken cantive by delightfulness of personality and warmth of handshake. What we'll get mostly is smiles. Smiles and a good deal of back-slapping and nice talk like you-look-finetoday-Hnd-how-is-the-family-getting-along. If you don't watch out, you'll soon get to thinking all the ·:::andidates are nice guys. Which is probably right. But have you ever sa1 down to think that all the candidates will try to looi< nicer than they really are? A candidate won't be smart if he doesn't try to do this. Your job as a voter is therefore to cut through the artifice and try to put your finger on the man inside. It can be clone. People have an instinct for distinguishing the phony from the real product. The phony is reflected :in the palabas that he does. Throw him out. All five will talk about the same thing'>. They'll talk about good government ("just wait and see what I'll do to those crooks"). They'll enlarge on the problem of defense ("you deserve peace to work for the prosperity of country and family") and the need for By Benito Mrncias really close relationships with neighbors and allies. But mostly they'll talk about your economic needs. They'll say - and there will be no debate on this 1~oint - that the major concern is the e:::onomic proble~: unemployment (2.5 million people out of jobs), unGeremployment (can only be guessed), cost of living (rising). Oh yes, they'll be polite. Candidates for high office_ must, first of all, b:; gentlemen. You can expect thell' words to be well measured. But what each candidate will tell you in effect is that it is he - and he only - who can provide the workable solutions. The other fellows are nice people, but what a confused lot they are! Why, only the other day this guy delivered himself of this fantastic approach to the dollar situation! Wasn't that very foggy thinking? Now, says he, let me dispel the fog by cutting straight to the core of the problem. So you listen to him. By the time he is through, the fog has grown thicker. So, yo~ see, it's very important that you size up caeh candidate as obje:::tively as you can. Forget the warm way he smiled at you and shook your hand. Take a hard look. Feel him. If he is a man of since;ity and purpose, interested in power not for pow~r s sake. but for that of the community, something in you will respond. The man you want is a big onebig in sincerity, courage, earnestness, resolution. He has great honesty, a sense of mission, a tremendous capacity for moral leadership. No, I'm not being platitudinous. People of this rr~2ttle have been cast in roles of leadership throughout history, but the need for them in the Philippines is greater now than ever before. Consider the econ~rnic problem. This is an excsc~ingly difficult thing to solve. We are a growing rat10n of 2~ million people, and our capacity to produce the things that we need - food, clothing and shelter - is not increasing -proportionately with our population. This, of course, affects us and our neigh?ors deeply. It is immediately related to our personal rn:ome - to our ability, in other words, to buy the goods and service'> that the family needs, to provide insurance for the family: and education for the children. Will they grow to adulthood like 2.5 million of our p('ople who are without employment and about to lose their hope and self-respect'? The problem is so 'big and its implication so, -vast that very often we don;t even know where to begin. All t~is does not imply that the situation is hopeless. Qmte the contrary. Our productive power, both in farm and factory, is increasing fast. We can make it catch up with the requirements of our growing population, make it generate prices well within our income and provide jobs for our children. If we are as strong a people as we think we are, we can do it in less time than we might suppose, possibly in five years. But this will demand great sacrifice. That's why we need strong moral leadership. The econom1'sts disagree with you too strongly if you assume that the basic factor of the Philippine economy right now is our dollar reserve. You have to have United States dollars to carry on international trade. The U.S. dollar, you see, is the world's most easily convertible currency - you can exchange it for any kind of money you wish and do business with it anywhere. Our peso is good money, but the foreign businessmen with whom we have to deal want dollars, not pesos. You'll want to know what we need dollars for. We need dollars to import ( 1) consumer goods such as cloths and various food products that we don't ourselves produce in sufficient amounts, (2) machinery and facilities that we have to have to industrialize, to produce with locally available raw materials the things that we now have to buy from overseas markets. Our dollar reserves are vital to our economic growth. We get dollars through our exports - copra, coconut oil, sugar, hemp - which we ship to the U.S. and Europe. We get $567 million every year out of this. In addition, we get an average of $376 million from the U.S. government in the form of U.S. military expenditures, veterans benefits and economic assistance. This would suggest a strong dollar position. The trouble is that our imports on the whole are bigger than our exports. This means that our dollar expenditures exceed our dollar income. We'll admit that our dollar spending has never been 100 per cent wise. As long as human beings remain imperfect things, this would be a fair assumption. We are still importing many articles that we don't really need. But as a rule we have been careful with our dollars. It has been just a short 11 years since the Japanese were driven out, when we resumed life as a Commonwealth and later as a Republic. We had, you'll recall, very little to begin with. Our economy was a complete mess. W-e couldn't produce our own food, and we had to buy cloth from overseas to make new shirts to put on our backs. In 1he face of this, we had to rebuild. We had to get new equipment and facilities to reconstruct our physical plants. All this required dollars. We are still rebuilding. But this is no longer the word to use. The word now is build. We must build new enterprises for our expanding population. This also will require dollars. Thus we find that the strain on our dollar reserves now comes from two sources: (1) the continuing need AUGUST, 1957 to import consumer goods and (2) the need to buy capital goods (such as machinery) to make our economy move forward. The result has been a steady depletion of our reserves. From roughly $669 million in 1945, some $620 million of which came from the U.S. government in war damage payments, the level has gone down to less than $190 million in September 1957. I wish I could update you on the statistics. But the wife did a good .iob of deaning up the work desk, and the result was that this Central Bank pamphlet was mislaid. But the 1954-55 figures tell the substance of the story. In 1955 the gross domestic investment was P800 ($400) million, 10.6 per cent bigger than during 1954. Thi" ~hows ~rou the rising curve of domestic investment in industry. On the other hand, exports in 1955 amounted to $34,.9.15 million, compared to $335.01 million in 1954. Imports in 1955 amounted to $527.68 million, against $473.54 during the previous year. This shows a slight rise in exports and a substantial increase in imports. Of the 1955 import payments, $98.72 million was spent for capital goods (against $77.26 million in 1954), $253.46 million for raw materials for various manufactures (against $229.26), and $173.84 million for consumer goods (against $163.21 million). ·we thus have a pattern of increasing dollar outflow for capital and consumer goods, no appreciable increase in exports (and therefore a static level of dollar earnings) and increasing imports (more dollar spent). This re,sults in a difficult situation which can easil~r become untenable if we don't do something drastic about it. The solution, as you must be deciding- b:v now, is austerity and increased production. We'll have to consume less and produce more. ·This way we can save dollars (by not importing stuff that we can do without) and earn more doilars by increasing the production of export goods. We'll just have to stop thinking about that Palm beach suiting we saw at the display window and be contented with khaki or ordinary linen. New earrings for the wife and Chanel No. 5 are out. We'll have to be happy with the old car. We'll have to save and put our surplus in the bank. We can then make more money available for production. But for us to do this willingly and effectively, we have to have a leader who is strong enough to sacrifice with us and for us- and courageous enough to tell us, when the going really gets tough, to sacrifice some more. This is the kind cf leader that we need in these times of uncertaint~r and trouble. If a candidate tells you life will be simply rosy for you if he gets elected, you can be very sure he is not giving you the. facts. I doubt if you would want to do anythi!1g with him. .PAGE 3

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