Beware of Mr. Clean

Beware of Mr. Clean | Daily Tribune

Vico Sotto, the boy mayor who washed away the sins of his fathers. “Future President.” Unimpeachably neat that he can claim anything outrageous and people will still clap.

So when he accused media veterans of taking P10 million for an interview, few demanded proof, and assumed cleanliness equals truth.

If Vico truly wanted transparency (like he so proudly “does” in Pasig) he’d stake his neat image in court with evidence, not innuendo. Otherwise, you’d think somebody paid him P10 million to perform this much.

Instead, he hummed the favorite trapo song of blaming the media. What’s innovative about laundering old Marcos tactics through a millennial face? The “cleanest politician” in the Philippines playing the filthiest game?

The genius: it doesn’t even matter if it’s true, nor does he have to censor the press; he needed only to radicalize his significant youth base into seeing media as the irrelevant, compromised, old-guard trash.

If you’re a last termer, you take on “dirty” media at a time when people are angry at your rival, so that, when you run for the highest office, the only version of truth left standing is yours.

Because if journalists are crooks, who’s left to decide what’s true, what’s corrupt, what’s ethical? He who carves himself into marble with his “I alone can fix it” politics. Suddenly, Mr. Clean doesn’t merely govern Pasig; he governs the country’s moral spin. The one who controls the credibility of information controls the war.

It’s possible this was not even Vico’s idea. Some bigger player in politics or business or a donor or a party machine or an elder at his ear might need a clean-looking frontman to hurl the grenade while smiling like the boy next door.

Because who benefits if the media is discredited? If Vico kneecaps journalism now, he’s effectively softening the battlefield for those who want to operate without the watchdogs.

The ones who burn the press first are never the cleanest; they’re the ones planning the longest game. History is full of leaders who positioned themselves as the clean alternative.

The Constitution bars him from running for mayor again. But what if he’s prepping a proxy candidate? Or protecting someone else? What if he ensures that whoever succeeds him inherits a media environment too cowed to scrutinize succession deals?

That is, if he doesn’t need to be the only “good” mayor, the “miracle worker” whose message is “Without me, you drown again.”

Vico knows the saint image is unsustainable, and he’s suffocating under it. So he tarnishes himself just enough to be a little “bad boy” so he doesn’t collapse from the impossible pressure of perfection. Because you can’t be a hero without an enemy.

Today it’s the journalists. Tomorrow it’s every institution that doesn’t believe saints can lie.

Don’t fall for the halo act. If a “righteous one” wants absolute immunity from criticism, Mr. Clean is just Mr. Absolute.