Change of Tone

With PAN activists in a state of furor owing to the "humilliating defeat" on Sunday, Vicente Fox now says, "[Calderón] is my friend and we know each other and work together for the same purpose."

A couple days after Fox's infamous letter on the elections was sent to him, Jorge Fernández Menéndez wrote a column with more details on the missive yesterday:

Without a doubt, the economic figures for the government of Vicente Fox were better than those of Calderón's first three years, the question, nevertheless, is if in these conditions more could have been done and why thorough, structural reforms were constructed, that the country then required and requires with still more urgency today. The same could be said of security: was the present crisis caused by this government or was it inherited?

[Break]

We talked [in the column] about politics and not laudable achievements, from the prohibition on tobacco advertising to the creation of the Institute of Genome Medicine. Every president has had accomplishments of this sort, but they don't to be judged on them but rather due to the vision that they had, the changes they introduced and the perception of how they handed the country over to their successor. That's what Vicente Fox wants to debate and it clearly shows who his adversary is: Felipe Calderón. That's where the true fracture of the PAN lies.

Or taken another way, it's all about vanity: Fox thinks the short-changing of his legacy takes precedence over his ideological affinity with Calderón (to which he referred today). But if the fracture of the PAN really comes down to Fox's obsession with his legacy, shouldn't the differences between the different wings be easier to overcome?