When authority by itself is not enough

Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña may have warmed the hearts of a few settlers at a government lot the demolition of whose houses he physically stopped in an ugly spectacle on Wednesday. But his confrontation with the court sheriff who was merely trying to enforce a court order turned off people in numbers far more numerous than those he pleased.

Maybe Osmeña was right that the subject of the demolition were houses actually outside the area specified in the court order. And yes maybe the court sheriff was not armed with the right documents delineating exactly the area where houses were to be demolished. But in any public confrontation between a high official wielding immense power and a lowly employee simply carrying out an order, there is no doubt to where public sympathy tends to gravitate.

The sheer weight of Osmeña's authority as mayor, embodied by nothing less than his physical presence, would have been enough to stop the court sheriff dead in his tracks. For Osmeña to do more – grab the sheriff by the lanyard of his ID, point a finger straight at his face, and threaten to go after him for the rest of his life – was uncalled for, to say the least.

By his actions, Osmeña only succeeded in heaping scorn and disdain upon himself instead of emerging heroic. The court sheriff was too small and puny for Osmeña to heap the full force of his fury upon. If Osmeña felt he had the goods on the matter, he could have swiftly caused the filing of an urgent motion in court contesting its demolition order.

Or, if Osmeña was truly spoiling for a spectacular public fight, he could have stormed the court itself and barged in on the judge and did to him what he did to the hapless court sheriff. Then we would have seen the stuff of which brave and heroic men are made of. But then, that opportunity is lost now. What's done is done. Osmeña will just have to learn to live with the backlash that came instead of the plaudits.

If there is one thing instructive about this incident, it is that there is nothing predictable about the Cebu City mayor. First he was doing something really great like cracking down hard on the practice of counterflowing, succeeding where no one else even had the balls to try. The next thing you know, he was flying off the handle over something that, because it was not done appropriately, eventually proved more politically costly.