This Week's News Makers

Corazon Aquino

The big news that hit the world Sunday was the death of Corazon Aquino. She is from a nice trip down memory lane. I remember when she took over from the Marcos regime in the mid 1980s. Truly this woman was a remarkable leader. She was asked to "challenge the dictatorship [Ferdinand Marcos]" and she "obliged." Self described as plain housewife, she became more than that - restored democracy to the nation and her administration wrote and passed a new constitution.

In an area of the world where corruption abounds, Corazon Aquino passed power to her democratically elected successor. It would have been easy for her to stay on and extend her term, just as Marcos did and another president in 2001, Estrada tried to do. This is a clear example of leadership and patriotism. Not necessarily an unwilling participant in the political process, she realized that her term was up and that it would appear incongruent to extend it.

Which begs the question -- term limits in the United States at all levels of government. In Virginia, for example, a governor can only serve one term. There has been talk about the President of the United States and Congress working on a bill that would remove the term limits. Here are a few articles on the internet about removing those term limits:

America's Independent Party National Committee
Govtrack.us

Obviously, there are valid points to both sides of this discussion. If you have a genuine leader and the country is running well, it would be great to see the person who made it right stay in power, after all, he or she probably worked hard to make it right. Then again, our first President, George Washington was correct that a democracy doesn't work (the democracy that we fought for and show as an example to the rest of the world) when the country is ruled by a "king" or worse yet, a despot.