The media in Mexico and the United States are noting that the electorates in both countries are “weary” of the narrowness of their national political discourse. In other words they are both cynical and bored with their politicians, the campaigns, their national political rhetoric and their meager political choices.
In Mexico, the presidential campaign theoretically doesn’t begin until next month. But already many voters are tired of the “pretty and hollow” candidate that the media has already baptized “the front runner” who will bring back to power the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ran the Republic with 71 years of open and insatiable corruption, brutality and rapacious guile.
In the United States the Republican party has carried out what seems to an increasing number of voters to be an endless series of debates (20 in all) which have not yet revealed a convincing favorite. Senator John McCain has called for an end to the debates, saying their negativism is harming the GOP, “driving up negative impressions of the party’s presidential candidates.” Many conservatives seem to agree that it’s not “impressions,” but the truth about unelectable candidates. Something McCain’s disastrous experience with Sarah Palin evidently taught him. The debates have provided a raft of laughably outlandish, startlingly ignorant and depressingly intolerant would-be aspirants. The short-lived popularity of several offered opportunities to flourish their lack of qualifications. “Which one of these candidates would you want with his finger on the button for the bomb?” asked one columnist. The guy who believes Satan is aiming his pointed tail at the “soul wounds” of the U.S., meaning men and women who have sex for reasons other than procreation, women who work outside the home? That’s Rick Santorum, if you missed the quasi-Catholic mysticism.
A study has shown that 98 percent of sexually-active Catholic women tend to use contraceptives at the same rate as their non-Catholic counterparts. Not a few Catholics suggest that if Santorum wants to tinker with other people’s private lives, he should try to “clean up” his own parish before promoting legislation that would include everybody else. But he doesn’t have a chance at that either.
In both nations, much of the electorate expresses a weariness that makes clear a dissatisfaction in a coming race between unreassuring choices.
In Mexico, the ruling pro-church, pro-business National Action Party (PAN) of President Felipe Calderon, has increasingly become a target of bitter citizen criticism for its unabashed corruption and a porous and unreliable justice system. Now, suddenly, it has received some help from the first female presidential candidate to be chosen by any major Mexican party. Josefina Vazquez Mota’s opinion poll ratings have climbed from 23 percent in November to 35 percent now. But she is still 16 points behind Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI, who has been the ratings leader since last year. The problem Vazquez Mota has, say political observers, is that she repeats the same speech over and over. It’s not a bad speech, but its qualities begin to diminish after the tenth time, even for ardent supporters. Yet the PAN hopes the choice of Vazquez Mota will attract independent and disillusioned citizens (whose numbers are seen as growing) as well as young voters to the Blue and White banner.Lagging behind her is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the former popular mayor of Mexico City, and the man that many Mexicans still believe beat Felipe Calderon in 2006, only to have his victory overturned by a tainted electoral “court.” But his post-election choices – organizing endless demonstrations aimed at bringing the capital to a standstill – angered too many people. He became a full-time nay-sayer and gradually lost his grass-roots underdog support. His effort this time around is widely judged a vanity campaign. During the 2006 presidential race, he shook investors and the business community with slashing rhetoric. Now he is packaging himself as a moderate to business leaders and the small-business sector. In 2006, he attracted left-wing voters and those who were non-aligned. But since then, most of those have wandered off to different political venues. Oddly enough, many now are in the questionable embrace of the PRI. He has little support and no chance, say veteran analysts.
His presence in the Mexican presidential campaign is sort of like the presence of Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich at Wednesday’s “Arizona Republican Debate.” Why are these people there? But then the presence of Rick Santorum as leader of the GOP pack is turning into a large question mark. His attitude toward women seems a bit antediluvian, certainly anything but a big vote-grabber. He’s against contraception, even within marriage. He’s against abortion even in cases of rape and incest. He’s against women working, women being assigned close to combat during war. “He just wants to keep women on a very short leash,” said a woman in her late sixties from St. Louis, while declining an invitation to join a group of friends gathering for snacks and drinks, and to watch the debate. She had once been active in local GOP politics wherever her husband’s job took them. “I’ve seen two, and watched TV coverage of others. They’re creepy. You don’t know whether to laugh or swear.” She shook her head. “Can you believe that these people belong to the same party as Dwight Eisenhower did?” “So who are you going to vote for?” she was asked. “Not any of these people. They’re not presidential calibre.” She sighed. “I don’t think I’ll vote this time.”
Finally, we come to the candidate who will most likely become Mexico’s next president, Enirque Peña Nieto. At 45, his political career is the result of being groomed for high office almost from the beginning. He is related to several former governors on both sides of his family and has a number of influential patrons. As a result he was elected governor of the wealthy state of Mexico in 2005. Because of his connections to a long list of well-known priista heavyweights, he has spent much of his life in the company of an equally long list of people whose public histories are intertwined with misdeeds and political scandal. The history of the PRI up until the moment voters threw it out of power in 2000, is pocked with powerful people doing unpleasant things to opponents, and to the Mexican people – and believing, often correctly, that they could do anything with total impunity. Therefore for people who care to look, say political analysts and journalists (people who do care to look), Peña Nieto’s own history is soiled by a certain amount of unpleasant references.
He is a handsome man, as every media reference to him seems to mention. This, and his sense of immunity, it is said, have marked several moments in his life with scandal. Columnist Ciro Gomez Leyva has reported in the newspaper Milenio that Peña Nieto admitted to fathering two children out of wedlock during his first marriage to Monica Pretelini, with whom he had three children. Peña Nieto said he came home late one the evening in January 2007 after a long work day, and found his wife unconscious in bed after suffering a seizure. There was gossip that he had killed his wife. But there was no proof of that said officials. And it was termed merely “Mucho ruido pero pocas nueces” (“Much noise about nothing”). His marriage to TV soap opera actress, Angelica Rivera, was delayed until 2010 because Angelica was divorced from her husband, Televisa producer Jorge Alberto Castro. After some negotiations with the church plus a trip to Rome, the church found that Angelica’s previous marriage “did not count,” as one journalist wrote. Maybe the seam between church and politics is where Santorum should begin his work on Satan.