EDITORIAL - Aquino must treat the Rama case gingerly

Some quarters are seeing a parallel between what happened to then governor Gwen Garcia in 2012 and what is now happening to Mayor Michael Rama. In December of 2012, Garcia was suspended by Malacañang under suspicious circumstances. Rama now faces the prospect of similarly being suspended by Malacañang, also for suspicious reasons.

When Garcia was suspended in 2012, it was just before the 2013 elections. Rama is now being investigated by the Department of Interior and Local Government. By the time the DILG winds up its investigation, it just might conveniently be just before the 2016 elections as well. Any suspension of Rama by that time will certainly affect his political footing, the way it did Gwen and the Garcias.

In case you have noticed, we have purposely omitted mentioning what the charges were against Gwen and what the charges are now against Rama. That is because we refuse to dignify what are clearly the political machinations of their opponents. To do so would mean we allow ourselves to play along with political chicanery. And we refuse to be taken for fools who cannot see things for what they really are.

There is, however, a big difference between the Gwen case of 2012 and the Rama case of 2015. The man who wields the real suspending authority in both cases, President Aquino, is no longer the same person in 2015 that he was in 2012. Back in 2012, Aquino still enjoyed a certain degree of popularity and trust. The Aquino of 2015 is widely despised and is in fact now the subject of growing calls for his resignation.

In 2012, the popularity of Aquino was such that people were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt even if the decisions he made were potentially wrong. Aquino no longer has that kind of political capital in 2015. His pockets are running out of political goodwill. There is a very real possibility that any wrong decision he makes will drive him broke.

In the case of Rama, Aquino has to tread his way through very carefully. One thing he needs to remember is that Cebu has always been the hotbed of the opposition. Since he is a person who seems to always invoke the memory of his father and mother, it might serve him well to remember it was to Cebu that his mother Cory repaired when Edsa first broke.

With calls for his resignation getting louder, Aquino cannot afford to create a situation where a miscalculation could provide the spark that might actually lead to his downfall. We are not saying it is, but the possibility is there that suspending Rama, which will be seen as a crackdown on the opposition, might just prove to be the tipping point in Aquino's now very precarious position.