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AMERICAN presidential politics are where we patterned our own, except that in most cases, the Filipino penchant for adopting form rather than substance was the overarching consideration. Thus, when our American colonials imposed on us the presidential-unitary system of government, we incorporated this into the 1935 Philippine Constitution. The 1974 Marcos Constitution subsequently sought to abrogate this model and fashioned a mongrelized version of a strong presidency within a parliamentary system. It was touted at that time that Marcos père idolized the French parliamentary model with a strong presidency – personified by Charles de Gaulle. Thus, in Ferdinand's opus, he introduced the parliamentary system in the Philippines installing himself as the strongman and established the Batasang Pambansa — with Cesar Virata, the technocrat as the prime minister and political castrate.
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