Vice President Jejomar Binay. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO / NINO JESUS ORBETA
For Vice President Jejomar Binay, only a thin line separates his official work and stumping for Malacañang.
“Let’s not be hypocrites,” Binay said on Thursday when asked by reporters in Tabuelan town, Cebu province, to comment on the statement of Cebu Vice Gov. Agnes Magpale, a member of the ruling Liberal Party, that the Vice President, a long-declared candidate for President in the 2016 elections, is campaigning too early by province-hopping.
“Let’s just be honest with each other. We will not be able to distinguish whether I am working or campaigning,” Binay said.
Whistlestop-style
As head of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council and President Benigno Aquino III’s adviser on migrant workers’ affairs, Binay is going around the country attending to business.
But he conducts business whistlestop-style—speaking at meetings, pumping the flesh, giving away T-shirts and eating with the locals—arousing suspicion that he is campaigning on government time and expense.
Cebu was his latest stop. He stayed three days and departed on Thursday.
His schedule, as released by the Office of the Vice President, saw him meeting with barangay residents and officials and joining them in a “boodle fight”—a military-style lunch where people share a big meal laid out on a long table, eating with their bare hands.
Binay toured the province, visiting marketplaces at every stop. At one stop, he turned over wheelchairs and medical equipment to local health authorities.
Not shy
But he was not rabbity about the political significance of his activities.
“For incumbents, it will be hard for you to distinguish if we are campaigning or we are working,” he said.
In Cebu, for instance, the Vice President said he went to see an overseas Filipino worker who needed help and then he had to go to another event that involved following up a housing project of Pag-Ibig Fund.
And “along the way,” he said, he would go to places like Tabuelan, where there were journalists waiting to interview him.
In Tabuelan, Binay met with local officials and later joined them in a boodle fight at the public market.
Taking public’s pulse
When asked what he was doing in Tabuelan, Binay said he made a report on the progress of the government’s rehabilitation efforts in communities ravaged by Supertyphoon “Yolanda” 
The Vice President was expected to return to Manila Thursday night.
Last week, he traveled to Cavite province to feel the public pulse on the charges of corruption and ill-gotten wealth hurled at him in a Senate investigation.
Binay has denied he pocketed kickbacks from municipal infrastructure projects when he was mayor of Makati City.
He has also denied using dummies to conceal his ownership of real-estate property, including an 8,877-square-meter lot in Comembo village in Makati and a 350-hectare agricultural farm in Rosario town, Batangas province.
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