I smell desperation

PAN is running ads highlighting Peña Nieto’s “messy” personal life — specifically that he has at least two illegitimate children — and trying to make something of the fact that Lopez Obradór has been married twice.

Both are widowers, although questions about how exactly Mónica Pretelini Sáenz died have been the subject of rumors for years (and are much nastier — and potentially fatal to a political career — than mere infidelity).

I’m not sure what the point was in trying to rope in Lopez Obrador. His first wife, Rocío Beltrán Medina, although considered an excellent political strategist and adviser to the then Jefe Gobierno, was almost never mentioned or even photographed in the press — not only because Mexican media tends to avoid discussing public figures private lives, but also because it was well known that she was dying of lupus. Incidentally, the day she died, 13 January 2003 was the only day her husband skipped his normal 6 A.M. press conference.

Lopez Obrador, while he and Peña Nieto both made a list of Mexico’s most eligible bachelors, didn’t court in the limelight and didn’t marry or shack up with a soap opera star and didn’t even move in with Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller until they were married. How scandalous is that?

I can see why PAN would resort to mud-slinging against Peña Nieto.  Cutting into his lead makes sense, even if this is a very unMexican way of going about it.

The party has used, and used effectively, U.S. media advisers and propaganda techniques.  In the U.S., the rationale is that the personal choices one makes in life somehow reflect one’s governing ability and style (though I don’t see it… Franklin Roosevelt had an extremely complicated personal life, Mary Todd Lincoln was nuts, and Lady Bird Johnson was known to opine that “presidents should be born orphans and die bachelors”).

But, what’s surprising is the attempt to rope in Lopez Obrador, unless he is seen as a much larger political threat than acknowledged.