Rama’s public challenges

If anything, former Cebu City mayor Michael Rama should just make good on his plans to clear his name by lobbying to the Supreme Court and by not having to engage Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña in a series of public challenges that would only waste both his resources as well as his time and that of the public.

The former mayor is questioning his loss to Osmeña in last May’s elections at the Commission on Elections (Comelec), and it would entail quite a considerable amount of expenses to proceed with a recount of the ballots.

And Rama’s plan to ask the Supreme Court to intervene and help clear his name is perhaps one of the few steps he can logically pursue aside from seeking an audience with President Duterte through acquaintances like former president and now congresswoman Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

But apparently, the former mayor is taking it to Osmeña because of what the mayor did by tagging Team Rama–allied barangay chairpersons as alleged drug lord protectors.

If Rama stood idly by and watched his own back, he may not only lose the support of these Team Rama–allied barangay officials; he may gain a lot more political enemies if these barangay officials jump ship and join Osmeña’s camp.

Thus, the drug test challenges and now the lie detector test challenge is not only useless since it is inadmissible in court, but the results can go either way: as far as we know, polygraph or lie detectors use a person’s heart or pulse rate to determine if the person is lying or not, and anyone’s pulse can get riled up simply by provocation.

And Mayor Osmeña has not been averse to responding, though as he put it, he wanted to do so on his own terms. When asked about a lie detector test, the mayor said he is game so long as US experts were called in to monitor the process.

Is Rama willing to spend for services to conduct a lie detector test just to prove his innocence? We don’t know whether this test will come about, but again, how the results would impact on public perception is iffy at best.

We don’t doubt the former mayor’s determination to clear his name, but there are reservations over the public’s memory of his efforts to do so in light of President Duterte’s pronouncement heard all over the country.

Rama also has plans to run for mayor anew, but whoever advised him to do so should probably ask him to reconsider at least until President Duterte himself makes the pronouncement to clear his name.

In the meantime, he’ll keep himself busy filing libel suits against Osmeña and others who dared to accuse him of being a drug lord coddler.

It wouldn’t be such a happy Christmas season for Rama, but he has a full new year ahead of him to work on becoming a political force again. He certainly won’t be able to do so through these challenges, which would be an expensive exercise in futility without a Supreme Court or presidential seal of clearance.