Different tune
Just two weeks ago, Vice President Jejomar Binay himself—not anyone from his phalanx of spokesmen—told the nation that he was holding out hope that President Aquino would endorse him for president in the 2016 elections. “Basta hanggang sa huling sandali, umaasa ako na ikokonsidera ako (Until the last minute, I am hoping that I will be considered),” he said.
The implication being, not only that he and the President remained friends despite the escalating hostilities between their respective allies, but also, and more importantly, that the Aquino administration’s track record was something he could bank on to woo the people’s esteem and catapult him to the highest office in the land. The endorsement was only crucial, after all, if the President retained enough public goodwill at the end of his term that could then be rubbed off on Binay as his officially designated heir apparent; otherwise, it would be the proverbial kiss of death, and who’d want that? Certainly not the putative front-runner in the race. By publicly seeking the President’s benediction, Binay was saying in effect that this administration—of which he has been a part as a member of the Cabinet since Day 1—had enough of a good thing to get him to Malacañang.
Ah, but what a difference two weeks can make. In that period, the Vice President has been dealt a succession of body blows. The latest surveys show his ratings in steep decline while those of Sen. Grace Poe, a late and unexpected variable in the race, are surging, apparently at his expense. The reconfiguration was such that Mr. Aquino himself began taking a second look at Poe, inviting her over for an exploratory chat. That gesture, plus the President’s other utterances that also seemed to favor another alternative—Interior Secretary Mar Roxas, Binay’s bitter rival, who has a plausible claim to Mr. Aquino’s endorsement given that he gave way to the latter in the 2010 polls—must have been truly unnerving to the VP’s camp.
Now Binay is singing a quite different tune. With a one-sentence letter, he has resigned from his Cabinet posts and cut his ties with the administration, and quickly launched a broadside at the administration as “palpak” and “manhid” (inutile, indifferent). He pronounced Mr. Aquino’s much-touted drive against corruption as an exercise in selective justice, with only members of the opposition figures haled to court and administration allies remaining untouched. That much is true: This administration has been remiss in cleaning out its ranks with as much zeal and thoroughness as it went after the likes of now-indicted senators Juan Ponce Enrile, Jinggoy Estrada and Bong Revilla. But this is also true: The government that Binay is now denouncing for its missteps and culpability in the matter of the discredited Disbursement Acceleration Program, or the stalled inquiry into the pork-barrel scandal, is a government of which he happens to be the second highest-ranking official.
For the last five years, Binay was part and parcel of Team Aquino, the point man for OFWs as presidential adviser on overseas Filipino workers’ affairs, and head of the National Housing Authority besides. These two posts gave Binay much leeway to cannily stay above the fray: While the administration staggered from one controversy to the next, the VP was gadding about in the provinces, giving away goods with his name on them, and glad-handing all and sundry in what only the most dense, or the most rabidly partisan, would deny as having constituted early campaigning.
And, as revelations about overpriced buildings in Makati and haciendas with faux-royal gardens in Batangas came to light in Senate hearings, Binay routinely swatted the rising tide of questions about his unexplained wealth as merely a grand demolition job. Even with the Ombudsman granting him his day in court, he has still refused to answer basic questions about his conduct and affairs in office. Not at the speech he delivered a couple of months ago, where not once did he address any of the charges against him, and not in his latest peroration, where he found the time to assail the administration whose endorsement he was plaintively seeking just two weeks ago, but where, once again, he did not mention the main issues that have eroded his standing in the surveys.
He’d answer at the proper forum, the VP said—but he has refused appearances at the Senate and the courts. He avidly sought the President’s blessing, but now he says his boss is palpak. (They’re “still friends,” his new spokesman insists.) This has to be what’s called talking from both sides of the mouth.
