Strange bedfellows
Politics makes strange bedfellows. I have heard of this quote since I cannot recall when. In election season, like what we have, I get enthralled when almost all opinion makers find remarkable occasions to refer to this line with astonishing relevance. Every time it happens, my horizon broadens as I learn something new. Quite unfortunately for me though, I do not know the author so for my inability to attribute to whoever coined it to him, I can only register a profound apology.
Even then, I read somewhere that this statement could have partly been taken from a work of William Shakespeare, The Tempest. So indeed, this coinage while archaic continues to possess contemporaneous application. True or not, I am in no position to validate this supposed attribution but just the same I will use it here in this column today aware of my own journalistic insignificance.
We take this quote to mean a host of different perspectives. For this article, I mean that political interests, mostly vested ones, bring politicians who have little in common, together. This context points to the personal interests of politicians, which may be divergent or at times conflicting, as the premium consideration that pull them to one another’s company. I believe that the voters mostly never get the slimmest chance of finding out what these hidden, personal and vested interests are.
Let us take the tandem of Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña and Councilor Mary Ann de los Santos. They are running for mayor and vice mayor respectively under a loose local group called BOPK opposed to Vice Mayor Edgardo Labella and former mayor Michael Rama, candidates of PDP-Laban, the political party of President Rodrigo Duterte, in alliance with Partido Barug, a Comelec registered local party.
I remember that at the turn of the century, Osmeña fielded a Menchavez (?) to contest the candidacy of de los Santos for barangay captain of Barangay Lahug. Lahug residents witnessed then the fierce animosity of Osmeña and de los Santos because almost every morning in the campaign period, the mayor was reportedly engaged in a vituperative (translation: somewhat offensive) campaigning against the woman political adversary. The seemingly vitriolic attacks of Osmeña failed because de los Santos, in asserting her leadership, humiliated him with an impressive margin of victory over his protege.
The apparent war between Osmeña and de los Santos did not end in that election. It was clear that they had irreconcilable political interests. After the latter’s triumph, the mayor was viewed to be maintaining his unfriendliness, nay belligerence, towards the village chief. He denied the city support to the barangay even in such critical area as education. At one point, de los Santos tried to stand defiantly against Osmeña’s alleged vindictiveness by starting a fundraising campaign to build the classroom for the Lahug Elementary School which the mayor deprived.
The Osmeña-de los Santos war escalated when the latter challenged the mayorship of the former in 2007. De los Santos ran under the KUSUG a party organized by former mayor Alvin Garcia, an erstwhile ally turned foe of Osmeña. To make the KUSUG support emphatic and emotional, Atty. Raymond Garcia, presently seeking re-election as city councilor, ran as de los Santos’ vice mayor. During the vicious campaign, Osmeña and de los Santos unleashed against each other a kind of language that I would describe as unprintable such that I puked listening to them then.
With that kind of warlike background, why are Osmeña and de los Santos now singing praises to each other? Do they ever imagine that the ugliness they painted of each other in previous times is now glossed over and replaced by their suddenly found mutual admiration? I believe Cebuanos know how to answer these questions. I am sure though that only their political interests make them swallow the indignities they heaped at each other to become strange bedfellows.
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