Chasing a Legacy for the Party He Grew Up With

Presidential candidate Felipe Calderon learned politics at the family dinner table. Mostly it was about how to lose.

His father had helped found the conservative National Action Party, and belonging to the PAN in those days meant losing elections, losing jobs and losing friends.

A kid taunted Calderon at school once and said that even if by a miracle his father ever won, Mexico’s ruling party would never let him take office.

“I asked my dad, ‘Is that true?’ and he said it was,” Calderon said. “So I asked him, ‘Why are we doing this?’ He said, ‘We do it because no one else wants to do it, and if no one else does it, Mexico is never going to change.’ ”

Decades later, Mexicans were finally ready for change, catapulting the PAN and Vicente Fox to the presidency in 2000 and ending 71 years of single-party rule.

If his dad was a man ahead of his time, Calderon is almost exactly where he wants to be. The earnest, conservative PAN loyalist is in a tight race with brash leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as they head into the July 2 presidential election.

Calderon doesn’t generate the same passion as Lopez Obrador, whose followers greet their man like Beatles fans at Shea Stadium. But only a year ago, no one outside Calderon’s party even considered him a contender.

Since March, he has run an aggressive and expensive TV and radio campaign assailing Lopez Obrador as a dangerous radical. Calderon’s weekly bus tours seem to reach any pueblo with a plaza big enough for his giant stage and megawatt sound system.

Calderon, 43, is a rudimentary guitar player who loves to sing. But a tin ear plagues his songs, as well as his speeches. He’ll sometimes rush punch lines or interrupt spontaneous cheering with his next paragraph.

His studious manner, Friday-casual slacks and pressed shirts often clash with the inescapable vulgarity of campaigning. While tossing handfuls of cheap campaign hats out the window of his bus at a stop in Aquismon, a town in the central state of San Luis Potosi, he turned well-bred Catholic schoolboy, wagging a finger at a man and ordering him to take only one.

Touting more tourism, he plays on local pride. “See this plaza?” he said at several stops. “This is the beauty of Mexico!”

His campaign is steeped in the free-market principles of his father’s party. His speech breaks down this way: Fox has avoided economic crisis, so let’s stay the course but do more -- more jobs, more investment, more roads, universal healthcare, safer streets.

Calderon’s core constituency includes a new Mexican middle class that has taken advantage of a stable peso and expanding credit to buy houses and cars and take vacations.

Under Fox, Mexico has for the first time since the 1970s escaped devaluations and other economic disasters. People feel safer about savings accounts and buying on credit. Under NAFTA, supermarkets and big-box retailers offer a selection of U.S. goods.

Calderon campaign ads warn that Mexicans could lose what they’ve gained if they pick a leftist president. He promises what nearly everyone here wants: better jobs.

“That’s what people need,” Maribel Hernandez, an engineer at the hydroelectric plant in Tamazunchale, also in San Luis Potosi, said during a Calderon campaign stop. “There’s a lot of richness here that can’t be enjoyed until you put people to work.”

Calderon is trying to bridge the divide between those in poverty and those who have escaped it. Part of the reason is campaign arithmetic: He needs votes from the poor.

The other reason, he says, comes from his father.

Luis Calderon believed that helping others was the first duty of God-fearing people, the candidate said, and that the best way was to steer Mexico toward democracy.

That became the family’s mission and routine in its hometown of Morelia, in Michoacan state. After clearing the dinner table, which doubled as campaign headquarters, Felipe and his five older brothers went door to door for their dad.

Calderon inherited his father’s passion for the PAN, officially joining when he turned 18. He even met his wife through the party -- Margarita Zavala, another second-generation panista, as the party’s true believers are called. She wasn’t interested at first, but Calderon persisted.

“We’d go out together on campaigns, and one day we were in Morelia to support a municipal candidate,” Calderon said. “We were in a neighborhood without running water, without drainage, passing out fliers.

“But it was a beautiful October afternoon and the sun was setting. I said, ‘I give you a sun and a town.’ ”

The line loses something in translation, but it worked. They’ve been married 13 years and have two boys and a girl, ages 3, 7 and 11.

Calderon was a fast-rising star in the PAN. He won his first election at 25, a seat on the Mexico City assembly, and then served a three-year term in the lower house of Mexico’s Congress before returning to party work. He was elected party president in 1996, when he was 33. He presided over the PAN during the ascension of Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive and one of a new generation of PAN politicians.

When Fox appeared to lock up the nomination, and the PAN appeared to finally have a shot at the presidency, Calderon applied to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for the 1999-2000 school year. He explained with no hint of sarcasm that he wanted to spend more time with his family.

“I had two children born while I was party president, and I had been away a lot,” he said. “My second son was born at 4 a.m., and at 6 a.m. I got a call that the governor of Baja California had died. I left the hospital and went straight to Baja.”

When pushed, he said he was tired at the time. “To win the 2000 election we needed a relief pitcher. That’s what I thought, and the truth is, it worked.”

Calderon was appointed to the Fox Cabinet in 2003 when the president’s energy reforms stalled in Congress. He was energy minister only eight months, quitting after a blowup with Fox over his presidential ambitions. He used the rupture to characterize himself as the “disobedient son,” creating political distance from the president should the end of Fox’s six-year term go sour.

At the time, Calderon polled last behind Fox’s interior secretary and Fox’s wife among possible candidates for the PAN.

Calderon may have learned to lose, but he didn’t like it. He persuaded party militants to approve closed primaries, in effect killing the chances of his better-known rivals. Panistas knew Calderon and his patrimony. And he easily won the party nomination last fall over Fox’s pick.

Fox is now one of his biggest supporters, though election rules forbid him from campaigning. The Mexican president, who cannot seek reelection, is still popular here, a gregarious and natural politician with a commanding presence.

But his accomplishments since booting out Mexico’s long-ruling party six years ago have fallen short of his promises. He needs a Calderon and PAN victory to cement his legacy.

Calderon, meanwhile, must convince voters that Fox and the PAN have put Mexico on the right track.

“We’re going to win and continue the process of change from an authoritarian Mexico to a democratic Mexico,” Calderon told a crowd of several thousand at a campaign stop in San Luis Potosi’s Ciudad Valles.

As the crowd roared, he smiled and looked for a moment like a winner.

Carlos Martinez and Cecilia Sanchez in The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.