By Patricia Evangelista
Philippine Daily Inquirer

It was June when David stepped out to meet Goliath. She will not go unchallenged, he said. She will not go unopposed. We will oppose her every step of the way.

Professor Randolf David said he knew it was foolish. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s men questioned his intentions. This is not public service, they said, to run for congressional office for the sake of standing in the way of one person. And so the sociology professor answered, one afternoon in July, sitting among his books and his papers while the rain fell and the camera rolled. “I believe it is the greatest public service to stand in the way of the quintessential traditional politician seeking to perpetuate herself in office for life.”

There was fear that the President would launch herself into Congress, galvanize the sitting legislation into changing the Constitution, and later position herself as prime minister, an office without term limits. David said he may not win, but he would certainly make it difficult for her. Winning was not the issue. The Liberal Party threw its weight behind him, welcoming him as the official candidate of the group. The United Opposition took up his cause. There were feature stories, television interviews, newspaper columns, online forums, letters to the editor, fan pages on social networking sites, all featuring the grey-haired Don Quixote in the red bandanna who rode a Ducati to class and promised to take his sociology texts to the halls of Congress.

Of course there was denial that the President would actually run for Congress. It was not the time to speak of it, said the men and women who spoke for Malacañang. There were more important matters for the chief executive to focus on without having to deflect conspiracy theories. On Dec. 1, after hearing Mass at the St. Augustine Church in her hometown of Lubao, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, 14th President of the Republic of the Philippines and perhaps the most unpopular, filed her certificate of candidacy for the second congressional district of Pampanga.

“After much contemplation I realized I am not ready to step down completely from public service,” she said in a radio interview.

In the same week, David, public servant, head of the University of the Philippines’ Department of Sociology, announced in his Guagua, Pampanga ancestral home that he will not follow through with his plan to challenge President Arroyo for the second district. He told reporters that Ms Arroyo would create not only a lopsided fight but also an “unjust situation” for her rivals.

“What GMA’s minions have prepared for her in my district is not an election but a coronation. I cannot participate in this electoral travesty.” There was no doubt, he said in a column published in this section, that she would take the second district.

In the past five months, Ms Arroyo has visited the second district more than 50 times, cutting ribbons and glad-handing. As president of the republic, she has offered Pampanga the same programs and services that the rest of poverty-stricken Philippines has been clamoring for with little result, and the mayors applauded her coming.

And so David walked away from Goliath. He is right that the odds are unjust. David knew this more than anyone when he announced without prodding in June of this year that he would stand in the way of a rampaging Arroyo who even at that time was treating the second district as Malacañang’s backyard. But he forgets, this is the Philippines. Every day is a battle against impossible odds. Here, a man can be killed for having P20 more in his wallet than the next man in the FX to Cubao. You can survive two years as a baby sitter in a random Middle Eastern country and come home for Christmas to be raped, shot and buried under a television van just because you took the highway to the hospital. Education is no protection. A gated village is no protection. Sex, profession, numbers are no protection. The odds are worse for some, better for others, but in the end, an “unjust situation” is the state of the nation, not just in the second district of Pampanga.

It flies in the face of logic for Professor David to claim he walks away because the odds are unjust, then adds that now he is pressuring our countrymen to ask Arroyo to relinquish her powers. He is asking her to resign if she does not want to be impeached or removed from office. He is urging her to take the path of decency by refusing to run for any position less than president. The last six years have shown us that there is greater probability of a dancing gorilla in a glitter-spangled tutu winning the second district of Pampanga than there is of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo voluntarily giving up power. Yet Professor David himself asks for her to step down anyway, because sometimes, it matters simply to stand up and fight.

He is right that the chances of winning are slim, but sometimes odds do not matter. The people of Isabela proved this true when a polio victim from Bombo Radyo won against an entrenched dynasty. The people of Naga demonstrate this, term after term, whenever Jesse Robredo stands for office. And lest we forget, the people of Pampanga demonstrated this when an unknown priest without means or name put on a flak jacket and won as governor. It is the way of this country to disprove impossible odds.

When Arroyo declared her candidacy, an architect named Adonis Simpao stood up to take David’s place in the Liberal Party’s lineup. David’s sudden refusal made it nearly impossible for Simpao to prepare, as demonstrated by the fact even the LP’s Frank Drilon did not know his name after he filed his CoC, but he took his stand. David is afraid that by running, he would legitimize an Arroyo win. We have come to a point when nothing the President does is legitimate, and even if she won by a landslide against David, it would not have been a legitimate win in the eyes of anyone, I suspect not even in her own eyes. There is greater danger that David’s choice has created: it is the claim from a man of David’s weight and intellect that there is no value in the political exercise at a time when a nation has little more than a vote to make a difference.

This column is written not against a man, but against a principle. It is written as a protest against the idea that the possibility of failure is a reason to renege on public promises and deny a nation clinging to small hopes. What gave a nation hope was not the possibility that Randy David would win, it was the fact that Randy David took a stand. Hope is rare commodity now, and it is one that Professor David offered the nation last June. I write this because a man I respect claims that by fulfilling a promise he puts at risk “the authority I have carefully cultivated as a social analyst and public intellectual,” forgetting that authority depends on the choices a man makes. Mostly I write this because I know that God will not arrive with a phalanx of angels singing Hallelujah when the next president is sworn into power, and that long after May 2010 comes, we will still continue taking impossible stands, not because we will win, but because we must.