Lopez Obrador Loses Big Lead but Not His Nerve

In this region in central Mexico that gave the world the mariachi and tequila, the white-haired man who would be president of Mexico is trying to get back into the groove.

A month ago, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador looked like a lock to win this country’s July presidential election. He was leading in all the polls, some by double digits. He was promising to bring a peaceful leftist revolution to Mexico.

But thanks to a series of missteps, and a ferocious media campaign by his opponents painting him as a reckless free-spender, his lead appears to have evaporated. Now he’s trying to jump-start his campaign by doing something that has always come natural to him: playing the underdog.

“The more they hit me, the more dignified I feel,” he told a crowd of about 500 people in this town in Guerrero state surrounded by fields of agave cactus, the prime ingredient of Mexico’s national drink. “Now that they’ve come at me with everything, they’ve really provoked a reaction among the people.”

In March, center-right candidate Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party began attacking Lopez Obrador in a series of televised ads that accused his leftist opponent of bankrupting Mexico City when Lopez Obrador was the mayor there. Lopez Obrador, the ads intone, “is a danger to Mexico.”

Calderon also linked Lopez Obrador to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a charismatic populist who has become the boogeyman of Latin American conservatives.

Mexican political analysts say Lopez Obrador hurt his own cause by failing to respond directly to the attack ads and by skipping a presidential debate last month.

“Lopez Obrador and his followers appear not to understand how a presidential campaign works in the democratic era,” analyst Denise Dresser wrote in the magazine Proceso. “Although Lopez Obrador refuses to recognize it, political campaigns have become Americanized. They are dominated by media.... They have become exercises in the progressive destruction” of one’s opponents, she wrote.

One poll late last month placed Calderon in front by 7 percentage points. But Lopez Obrador is telling his supporters not to worry.

“Our adversaries are mistaken, as are their publicists, because they think the people are stupid,” Lopez Obrador said at another campaign stop, in Ameca, southwest of Guadalajara. “We are going to show that the power of the people is worth more than the millions that they spend on their [television] spots.”

At each stop on a tour of the Mexican heartland states of Jalisco and Guanajuato that ends today, Lopez Obrador has told his audiences that he’s the victim of a coordinated campaign on behalf of the privileged classes, a “cabal” that is seeking to derail his plan to help Mexico’s poor.

On Wednesday, Lopez Obrador accused a top aide to outgoing President Vicente Fox of orchestrating a campaign of attack ads and manipulated polling on behalf of Calderon. The aide, Ramon Munoz, denied the charges.

Campaign officials say Lopez Obrador will not respond with his own attack ads against Calderon. They say the money they have to spend on television advertising is limited, and is better spent on ads that put forward the candidate’s record and a message of hope for the poor.

“A lot of people are telling me, ‘Respond to these attacks, defend yourself,’ ” Lopez Obrador told about 1,000 supporters in the Guadalajara suburb of Tonala on Friday. “But we’re going to stay on the same path, with the same strategy.... I don’t want to become president leaving little bits of dignity along the road.”

Lopez Obrador is counting on the mobilization of his “citizen networks” -- neighborhood block clubs supporting the candidate -- to bring out the vote on July 2. As one reporter traveling with the campaign put it: “Calderon has the air force, but Lopez Obrador has the infantry.”

Still, there is a clear sense of unease in the campaign: Polls by the Mexico City newspaper Reforma have shown a shift of 20 percentage points in Calderon’s favor over the last six weeks. The Reforma poll, whose objectivity is questioned by some Mexican pollsters, has Calderon up by 7 points. Other polls show Calderon with a much smaller lead.

Throughout his long career, the 52-year-old Lopez Obrador has performed memorably when fighting for his political life: In 2004, his popularity soared after his opponents tried and failed to have him impeached as mayor of Mexico City. The demonstrations in Mexico City in defense of Lopez Obrador were some of the largest the country’s history.

On Friday, the crowd in Tonala echoed that history when it began chanting one of the slogans from the anti-impeachment movement: “You are not alone!”

But media reports suggest that his closest campaign advisors are uncomfortable with the current strategy.

A cover story in Proceso, based in Mexico City, said that several campaign strategists had been rebuffed when they tried to persuade Lopez Obrador to change course at a meeting late last month.

“He didn’t allow anyone to speak another word,” reporter Daniel Lizarraga wrote, describing the meeting. “He assured them he knew what he was doing, and reminded them how he escaped the impeachment.”

Many of the people who turned out at Lopez Obrador’s rallies at the end of April agreed with the candidate that the commercials attacking him had only made their support for him stronger.

“It has to be for some reason that they’re putting rocks in his way,” Humberto Sanchez, 70, said in Tala, near Ameca. “It’s because he’s the only one with an idea how to change things.”