López Obrador in 2012

Thanks in large part to his success in Iztapalapa, speculation about López Obrador's presidential potential has surged in recent days. Here he is talking about a "date with history" in 2012, and he was on the cover of the most recent Newsweek en Español as well. The lengthy article and interview inside offer all the evidence of the futility of a López Obrador run. AMLO gave one rather smooth answer that called to mind his best moments on the campaign three years ago (he turned a Chávez-or-Lula question into a brief celebration of FDR, which he did a lot in '06), and spent more time talking about poverty than I remember him doing in a long time. But he spent a good portion of the interview railing against "the mafia", saying that Calderón was barely qualified to be a magistrate (no offense to magistrates), and talking about violence. From an electability standpoint, it doesn't really matter that he was talking about the absence of violence in his movement; the salient issue is that violence appears at all in his rhetoric. After all, no one would think to ask Peña Nieto, Paredes, Vázquez, or Ebrard about the potential of violence among their supporters. Taken as a whole, Mexicans who read this interview (which unfortunately is unavailable online) could be forgiven for wondering if a future with AMLO is one of bitterness and upheaval. And it wasn't the interviewers; they weren't exclusively soft-ballers, but they seemed to sympathize with AMLO and I only counted a single question that was combative.

In other words, in 2006 AMLO's rhetoric was about one six-thousandth as heated as it is today, and Mexico had no idea that he was capable of camping out along Paseo de la Reforma for several weeks, and even then concern about his tropical messiah complex kept him from the presidency. It's hard to imagine that since then he has earned an army of new followers, and he almost certainly lost the lion's share of his moderate supporters. The only impact of an AMLO candidacy would seem to be as a spoiler.