Hedging

All lies. Hearsay and uncorroborated evidence. Those were Vice President Jejomar Binay’s words in response to the flood of charges from certain quarters accusing him of corruption and mismanagement in his long and storied tenure as mayor of Makati City. Not only are they fabrications, he said, “but there is nothing in what they are showing as testimony that can stand [up] in a court of law.”

The legalistic tack wasn’t the core of his rebuttal, however. As though he were hot on the campaign trail, he devoted a large part of his televised speech—delivered on Thursday before an audience of black-clad supporters at the Philippine International Convention Center, and trumpeted by his factotums as in the “presidential style”—to narrating his humble origins as an orphan who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become a human rights lawyer and eventual mayor of the Philippines’ premier city. His sympathy for the poor and the oppressed, he said, was the mindset that animated his work in Makati—to bring the fruits of the city’s progress to its most deprived residents. He’s only being attacked now, he said, because “ambitious politicians … do not want us to extend to the whole country the programs we have introduced in Makati.”

As if on cue, torrential rains drenched the metro a day after his speech, and left large swaths of Makati—including the barangay where the Binays live—inundated and impassable. Leave it to the heavens to belie, with one stroke, the man’s oft-repeated boast that, under his reign, the city he has handed over to his son became a gleaming showcase of modernity and progress, of best practices for local government units: “Ganito kami sa Makati.”

As Binay rides high in the polls and behaves as though he were the virtual front-runner in 2016, it is inevitable that his record as a public official will invite intense scrutiny. And if he is truly secure in the strength of his achievements, indeed in the integrity of his record, he should be the first to welcome the attention. But in the face of questions and doubts about such material issues as the apparently overpriced P2.3-billion Makati City parking building constructed during his watch, he has chosen to hedge, dodge, and play coy, refusing to rebut the charges with specifics of his own, in fact stonewalling, and constantly lamenting that he is being targeted because he is the presumptive next occupant of Malacañang.

Thus, rather than present conclusive evidence to demolish truly damaging testimonies, Binay whipped out the class card. His enemies, he said, “do not want us to help the poor—surely because they come from rich families and their attitude and prejudice are to look down on everyone else.” Isn’t it rich? While he may once have been impoverished, he is far from it now. This is, in fact, the heart of the questions raised against him: how, on a mayor’s salary (he has never officially declared any other source of income), he became as wealthy as he is now. From where came the windfall? How did he manage to fund his repeated runs for public office, not to mention his wife’s and those of his son and daughters? And if he says he was never on the take but his former vice mayor and now political enemy was, what does that make of his vaunted executive abilities and judgment of character?

He did not, would not, say. What he said in effect was that he owed no one an explanation because he was once poor. Surely the Vice President can do better than this hedging.