Editorial - Don't get mad, get even

Either Mayor Michael Rama has not heard of the saying “don’t get mad, get even” or he does not believe in its practical application. For it seems that the posters Osmeña’s party BOPK has been putting up all over the city have gotten under the mayor’s skin.

To be sure, it is not likely that posters alone will win City Hall back for Osmeña. The former mayor himself knows that. But Osmeña also knows that getting under the skin of people can force them to make costly mistakes that can work in his favor.

And getting under the skin of people is an expertise of Osmeña. That is precisely why, if he did not start the poster war himself, he certainly is encouraging it to the hilt. Rama may not admit it, but by his actions and pronouncements, he is reacting the way Osmeña thought he would.

Rama, if he has not realized it yet, should be advised by his staff and inner circle to take up Osmeña in his game. Having started the poster war, Osmeña will be fair game for anything and everything that Rama can conceptualize on tarpaulin.

In fact, Rama can go beyond tarpaulins and go for even larger platforms for delivering his messages. And these messages need not be civil. If Osmeña can fight dirty, so can Rama. He can lace his messages with catchy filth.

Of course this should not be the kind of campaign he should be waging. Cebuanos certainly deserve something better from its politicians and would-be leaders. But sometimes there is a need to put certain people in their proper places, and if it takes a knee-jerk to do that, why not?

Cebuanos may be decent, educated and God-fearing people. But they are still human whose sense of propriety must certainly have a limit. In other words, a little scandal will not hurt them. They may, in fact, relish it, if not in public, then certainly in private.

But Rama cannot forever stay on the receiving end of those nasty messages on tarpaulin. He cannot keep on squirming and whining about them. He should promptly assemble his own brigade of dirty tricks experts who won’t cringe at a little nastiness.

Time and again it has been proven that there are only few true gentlemen in politics. Most of the time, politicians only look gentlemanly in the contrived scenarios dutifully painted by their public relations staff. But underneath the veneer lies an animal waiting to pounce.