Sick of It

Secretary of Tourism Rodolfo Elizondo, the rare PAN heavyweight close to both Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón, was scathing in his assessment of Manuel Espino in a front-page interview on Excelsior today.

[If] he’s not content with the party, if he’s not content with the direction, if he’s not content with the performance of even the president of the republic himself, then the door is wide open. If no one has him here by force, then just how he came in, he can leave…

[Break]

You can’t continue in such a delicate moment, in terms of the country, in terms of the politics, economics, speaking out openly every time the señor has the urge.

Later, on Espino’s publicly voiced desire for a candidacy for federal deputy.

How can he, in a moment of crisis like the one the country is living, with such an enormous effort that the president of the republic is making, through it all this man has announced to obtain jobs and sustain the economy, and the Señor Espino runs around looking for a position, a position for which he doesn’t even want to risk popular election and he wants the president of the party to give it to him!

And, for good measure:

I have 26 years in the party; when I joined, Manuel was less than 20 years old. So he can tell me absolutely nothing, much less in the modern era.

I didn’t clarify this earlier in a post about Espino’s ambition to be a deputy: he doesn’t want to run for office in his home state, but rather wants one of the coveted party slate seats, allocated to each party based on its overall representation.