THERE is nothing official or otherwise particularly special about the 'first 100 days' timestamp applied to new presidents, so when President Bongbong Marcos initially said that he was not inclined to mark the occasion (the 100th day was on October 8), I thought that might be a sensible breaking of a rather useless tradition. One of the biggest handicaps of Philippine governance, at least at the national level, is its lack of continuity. Most things a national government needs to do cannot be accomplished within the span of 100 days, or a legislative session that lasts only a few months before taking a recess, or the three-year interval between elections; as a consequence, government does much less than it should, or could if it did not mentally fence itself in with timed interruptions.

Of course, dispensing with an arbitrary deadline like the first 100 days is not completely within the president's hands, since public expectations that the checkpoint on the calendar is important and will be acknowledged have been built up over the years. If the president is an adroit communicator he might be able to change that, but in President Marcos' case he hardly got the chance to try, as other officials spoke up first, most notably his cousin, House Speaker Martin Romualdez, and former president and Pampanga Rep. Gloria Arroyo.