Luis V. Teodoro | Velcro president

By LUIS V. TEODORO

MANILA — The US media called him “the Teflon President” because nothing ever stuck to Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States.

The former actor died in 2004, felled by Alzheimer’s disease. Marked by various scandals, among them the Iran-Contra mess, his two terms were disastrous to poor families, the number of whom increased by a third, and even, some analysts say, to the US’ multicultural character, which he never quite understood.

Acting on his belief that the poor were poor because they depended on government rather than on their own efforts, he slashed Federal grants for poor students and the families of the disabled. He was accused of union-busting and putting the lives of airline passengers at risk when he fired unionized air traffic controllers rather than grant their modest demands. He cut taxes and spent trillions in developing the loony “star wars” or Strategic Defense Initiative meant to counter the mythical arms superiority of the Soviet Union. He fathered the worst fiscal deficit in US history.

He sent Marines to Lebanon in an operation that has been described as “disastrous,” and invaded the tiny nation of Grenada on the ridiculous pretext that it was a threat to US security. Meant to circumvent US congressional sanctions against providing military aid to the Contras of Nicaragua by providing the latter aid from profits made in the sale of arms to Iran, the secret arrangement known as the Iran-Contra affair helped Iran-whose government had hostaged US diplomats in 1980– re-arm, and led to the indictments of key Reagan government officials.

Instead of rebuking him and his Republican Party cohorts, the US electorate rewarded Reagan by reelecting him by a landslide in 1984, and with consistently high approval ratings until his second term ended in 1988. The critical US media labeled him “the Teflon president,” after the Dupont Company trademark for the coating that keeps food from sticking to cooking pots and pans. Although, as Harry Truman trumpeted, the buck stops at the Oval Office, it never quite got there during Reagan’s twin terms.

In contrast, everything ends up in Malacanang and in the lap of Mrs. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, whose approval rating, incidentally, has reached another two-year low.

Although 10,000 miles away in New York, Mrs. Arroyo might as well have been in the Senate last Wednesday, when her former economic planning and current transportation secretary, plus the most controversial chair of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) since the unlamented Leonardo Perez, testified before the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee on the National Broadband Network (NBN) project.