EDITORIAL - Mary Ann stopping short is anti-climactic

Cebu City Councilor Mary Ann de los Santos has quit her post as minority leader of Team Rama, the party under which she ran and won in 2013. She stopped short of announcing her resignation from the party and her joining the BOPK. She should not have stopped short of making those twin announcements because any fool can see that is the direction she is headed.

Any announcement about something that everybody already knows is forthcoming will only be anti-climactic and not win her any extra leverage on anything, if that is what she is angling for. And if she is trying to court sympathy by what she did -- "I am deeply hurt, feel betrayed, and alone," she was quoted as saying -- then she is not going to get any and she only has herself to blame.

Mary Ann imagines herself to be an independent thinker. She should have said so right from the start. Better yet, she should have run as an independent. But when you belong to a party, and run and win under it, you are expected to stick with your party. Of course there is no "come hell or high water" even in politics. So if Mary Ann felt she could no longer take the same position that her party does on many things, she should have promptly quit.

But Mary Ann didn't. On many issues, she took the position of the BOPK. And yet she opted to remain with Team Rama. It is unfair, to say the least, for Mary Ann to expect Team Rama to continue preparing a bed of roses for her to lie down each time she comes home from sleeping with the enemy. She feels she is being bullied, she says. But did she ever ask why? If she never saw that coming, then sorry, but either she is naive or one who wants to have her cake and eat it too.

As to being independent, that is only herself talking, the self-righteousness old hat of all politicians. But ask any independent-minded Cebuano if they agree with her self-description. Chances are you won't find any. This is not, of course, to assail the positions she has taken. Perhaps they were in fact the right positions to take. But that is not the issue. Her party loyalty is. If she felt she no longer belongs, she should have done the principled thing and quit.

But Mary Ann chose to titillate Cebuanos for so long with her guessing game -- was she still Team Rama or was she already BOPK? It is all right to play games like that if you keep it within the realm of pure politics. After all, guessing is what gives politics much of its excitement, as when we wonder if Poe will run, or will Duterte, or whether Gwen will make a comeback to Capitol?

But having a Team Rama member side with Team BOPK, not once, not twice, but many times and then opt to stay with Team Rama and expect Team Rama to call out the band to celebrate that member's self-proclaimed independence as a matter of supposed principle is too far out to consider as inspirational or principled, even as a joke. To take that proposition seriously is like fishing for something from tuslob-buwa with a sewing needle.