The unraveling of Jojo Binay

Vice President Jejomar “Jojo” Binay has a strange strategy to quell the raging brouhaha about the stupendously overpriced Makati City Hall (aka parking) Building II and about the regal country villa sitting on a 350-hectare farm that also quarters a state-of-the-art piggery, race-horse ranch, orchid plantation, etc., which his family allegedly owns: Simply dismiss the accusations as nothing more than a pure political demolition job being perpetrated by a cabal out to make him “damaged goods” as a contender, let alone as the frontrunner, in the 2016 presidential race.

Does the strategy work? This is the fervent wish, no doubt, of his spin doctors who, in all probability, cooked up and sold this strategy as the best scheme there is to render worthless,beggarly, banal, completely undeserving of serious heed the loaded innuendos and charges being hurled against him and his family.

Spin doctors, or PR men as they used to be called, have a number of tricks and gimmicks to get a client or principal out of a jam or impossible situation. Such as Binay is now in. To cite a few:

Circumlocution. The idea here is to wrap the explanation to the malfeasance, misfeasance or improper deed in long and circuitous verbal acrobatics, 99 percent of which are irrelevant to the issue at hand. The objective: to make everybody forget the issue and to shift attention to the irrelevant portion of the explanation. For example, if you are charged with constructing a building indecently overpriced while serving as mayor, you go on TV and do a monologue about how you were orphaned at an early age, how you had to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, how you became a human rights lawyer helping the poor, the farmers, the fisherfolk, how you made the city you served as mayor for many years a place of bliss, blah blah blah. And you end your one-hour monologue with a one-sentence reference to the overpriced building issue: “Pulitika lang ’yan.”

Argumentum ad hominem. The most common defense ploy. Let’s say you are accused by a former acolyte of owning a fabulous mansion in the middle of a vast farmland complete with the accoutrements of a British regal residence, including a distinctive repro of the British Royal Garden; and he backed up his accusation with an aerial shot of the estate complex which, by its size and splendor, cannot cost less than P1 billion, a figure far beyond your earning capacity. How will your PR guys defuse the firestorm of negative comments the exposé will surely generate? Piece of cake. Strike up a pose of righteous indignation and call your accuser a liar, a rotten liar who has been put up to do a dirty job by a cabal of shameless conspirators. How did he get the aerial shot? Who gave him the money to rent the helicopter used to take aerial shots of the farm complex? The dirty liar was not even part of the group that took the aerial shot as he wanted us to believe. The farm? Pulitika lang ’yan.

Evasion. Sometimes called “changing the subject.” Say, you were pushed into a corner unable to think up a plausible, believable, convincing explanation for the patently overpriced parking building. Leave it to your PR retainers. The solution is simple; just issue the following statement: “Selective justice, this is what the nonissue that is the irrational concern over a building is all about. I condemn this penchant of the administration to target only opposition personalities for investigation and harassment. Look who are now under detention, all opposition stalwarts! And who are outside enjoying the perks of power despite unsavory charges tacked on their persons? Kaibigan, kapartido! And look what they are doing to a former president though frail and sickly. Kawawa naman! Selective injustice. Oh, the parking building? Pulitika lang ’yan.

Discombobulate. The less grating term for this technique is “doublespeak,” but the uninitiated prefer to call it “gobbledygook-ing,” and the cynics, “prevaricating.” The aim is to confuse, to hide the truth behind a flurry of arcane semantics. Let’s say you truly cannot explain away the overpriced building nor the grandiose farm villa. Switch to offense mode—attack, attack, attack, the panicked PR experts will advise you; only for you to realize a day later that you need new enemies, from among family friends at that, like you need a hole in the head. How do you rectify the boo-boo? Backtrack, your seasoned PR adviser, tells you—without losing face, of course. How? Make your spokesperson issue a statement: “Our leader remains an ally of and continues to be a real friend of the top leader’s family. The views he articulated in a statement the other day were a product of the experience and wisdom he gained as a life-long human rights advocate and as a lawyer well-versed on the constructs of our legal system. Incidentally, about the farm or the parking building, pulitika lang ’yan.” Try to make heads or tails out of this gobbledygook.

Based on the latest surveys by both Pulse Asia and Social Weather Stations the once-regarded political phenom looks like to have begun to unravel—his rating down by a hefty 15 percent would probably go down further before Senators Antonio Trillanes IV and Alan Peter Cayetano and Koko Pimentel are through with him.

Any advice as to how to stop the political hemorrhage?

Well, maybe Binay should overhaul his PR braintrust, inject veteran tacticians skilled in thinking strategically, composed and not prone to blurting off the cuff panicky statements that hurt rather than help whatever aim his camp is trying to achieve PR-wise. Priority: haul off from TV guesting the un-personable UNA staff to prevent him from talking nonsense that hurts millions, like you hustle off to the kitchen your mother-in-law to prevent her from mixing with your dinner guests and gossiping that you are a wife-beater.

Mart del Rosario ([email protected]) is a retired advertising-PR consultant.