Money Fails to Keep Up with Mouth

Highlighting an episode from earlier this month, Mauricio Merino says that Calderón's fatal flaw has been the incapacity or unwillingness to match his actions to his rhetoric:

In the country of flagrant contradictions, both things exist: the Interior Department recognized that essentially the government seeks to brake the IFAI [Mexico's information-access agency], while the president advocates for transparency and calls for state governments "to assume without limitation the standards of transparency and accountability that in this case the OECD is promoting". And of course, what flooded the media during those days was the virtuous declaration of the president, while the strategies designed to impede the transparency organ are consolidated were an issue for this newspaper [El Universal] and few more.

Nevertheless, the contradiction serves to demonstrate one of the preferred forms of this term: the use of forceful and thunderous speeches, which intend to substitute with words the inaction of the government in the foremost issues of public administration.

This criticism seems basically fair. Calderón, at different spots during his term, has shown an admirable ability to diagnose what Mexico's foremost problems are. His capacity and willingness to correct said problems have been far less impressive. As Leo Zuckermann mentioned a few months ago (and as he tangentially alluded to in December), the result is confusion.