An interview with Francisco Toro of Caracas Chronicles

Francisco Toro, the Quico of Caracas Chronicles, has shown some misgivings about the Rosales candidacy and the way the campaign is run. Since he is no stranger to this pages where ghost blogger Jorge Arena interviewed him extensively on the April 2002 events where Quico had a close look due to his work as a journalist, I figured out that I would ask him directly why is it that he has problems with the Rosales campaign and what would his suggestions be.

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

To start this interview, and give us material to further questions, could you briefly give us your main contention points against the Rosales as a candidate and the way his campaign is run?

Well, first off a caveat. I don't have anything in particular against Manuel Rosales - never met the man.

Like most people in the anti-Chavez movement, I'm hungry for a candidate who can really take the fight to Chávez, who can really put pressure on him, maybe even win. Admittedly, with oil prices the way they are and the government's pockets bulging, it would've taken a near-miracle to beat Chavez...but I was really hoping for a candidate who could, at least, make a race of it.

My problem with Rosales is that I don't think he's up to it. For a number of reasons.

First off, Rosales is not an eloquent candidate. Nothing the guy can do about it, I know, but it certainly is very difficult to challenge a cash-flush incumbent with a large and mobilized base if you don't get along with the candidate.

Secondly, I think his strategic positioning is all wrong. Right from the (late) start of his campaign, Rosales courted traditional oppo figures -people like Gerardo Blyde and Pompeyo Marquez and Enrique Ochoa Antich - putting them in his campaign command...not to mention his coziness with Alberto Federico Ravell, Granier and that set. He's gone out of his way to portray himself as The Official Candidate of the Anti-Chavez Political Class, and that's just a mistake: the traditional oppo political class is deeply unpopular in the country. Like it or not, 8 years of Chavista smears have worked: the opposition brand is badly damaged in the eyes of most voters.

It's been pretty clear to me for a long time that you can't beat Chavez from that kind of positioning, that the smart move was to triangulate the election, running at once against Chavez and against the traditional opposition political class. Rosales thought otherwise, and the results are out there for all to see: the guy's stuck with 25 or 30% of voting intentions. He has achieved the Oppo Political Class's dream of Unity...but the unity of the opposition only. The unity of the one quarter or one third of the electorate that can actually stand the Oppo Political Class, at the cost of alienating the two thirds or three quarters of the electorate that can't stomach anything that reminds them of the old AD or the Coordinadora Democratica. To me, that's just a losing strategy.


Thus I gather that your main sticking point is that Rosales is too associated with the past. Though some would say that Blyde and PJ were formed after Chavez came to office. Still, the question is with whom would Rosales run the campaign? We need to be practical here and I agree with you in many points since already in February I was bemoaning in this blog the delays in the opposition strategy. Yet, there is always the need for some folks with experience as Chavez has still dinosaurs like Rangel on board. In practical terms, besides a 80% Zulia cast in the campaign, what would you suggest that Rosales would have done to to manage his campaign? Hire non Venezuelan consultants? Make a strong right wing pitch? How do you expect that Rosales can link the NiNi and the traditional oppo in barely 3 months of campaign?

My point is really about symbols.

In 1992, when Bill Clinton first ran for US president, he realized he had a problem with the radical wing of his party. They turned off voters, and had become a real liability. Clinton, a politician who understood the power of symbols, picked out one of the most outrageous exemplars of that wing of the party - a community activist/rapper called Sister Souljah - for strong criticism.

The point is not that Sister Souljah was some kind of power-broker he needed to face down in the Democratic Party; she wasn't. The point was to distance himself publicly and symbolically from an association that was costing him votes. To stake out his moderate credentials and position himself as a guy regular gringos could trust for. And it worked.

Rosales needed a "Sister Souljah moment" - he needed to distance himself symbolically from the Globovision Talking-Head set, to pick a fight with these widely reviled figures. He needed to criticize Globovision, or Granier, or the guarimba movement in terms that would resonate with voters. That would have turned him into a candidate NiNis are willing to consider seriously. Instead, he had a Sister Souljah moment in reverse, rushing to surround himself with Coordinadora Democratica figures that polls show most Venezuelans actively loathe. Daniel, it's as if Clinton had named Sister Souljah as his campaign manager.

I see. Still, a Sister Souljah moment is not something that happens because one orders it. After all Clinton had a full year to find such a moment. It remains that Rosales had to organize a campaign and like it or not, there is still a lot of experience in the opposition. Or do you think that a Zulia only team of unknown faces would be enough to run a nation wide campaign?

Again, my concern is about symbols, because I see voting as a symbolically-laden act. I'm more worried about who is seen to be behind Rosales than about is behind Rosales. Rosales can get Peña Esclusa or Posada Carriles to run his campaign, for all I care, so long as that's done privately.

I'm trying to make a point about the symbolic and informational impact of the people you choose to surround yourself. Because people read those choices for clues about who you are. Political scientists describe this tactic as an "information shortcut." Meaning that it takes a lot of time and effort and bother to seek out information about a candidate, so rational voters who have limited time and interest in politics look for ways to make the process quicker and easier.

Party labels are the classic information shortcut, but since those don't really operate in Venezuela, voters will try to "get a feel" for what a candidate stands for by seeing who he surrounds himself with. And when voters - some of whom still don't know much about Rosales - look at who he's surrounded with, it's easy for them to lump him with a political class that - fairly or unfairly - they despise.

OK, let's change topic. You have made it clear that Rosales is not your cup of tea and will fail. Let's not rewrite the past and focus on what will the opposition have to do come January. Is populism, after Chavez, done in Venezuela? Do you think that a candidate with, say, a liberal agenda could mount a challenge that in two years could be enough to start weakening Chavez? Do you think that there is such a potential candidate these days? Or do we need to wait for ten more years until all the old opposition dies out and the Chavez agenda exhausts itself and thus anything will seem good enough?

Well, I've gotten burned with futurology often enough that I want to be very careful with this one.

I don't think an explicitly liberal pitch is going to be successful in Venezuela for many years to come. What we need is liberalismo con vaselina - the kind of thing Lula has done in Brazil. Liberalism packaged in leftist rhetoric. Little by little, Lula is bringing Brazilians around to realizing that a state with real checks and balances, with a working institutional system, an independent central bank and orthodox financial management can be compatible with responsible welfare spending. And little by little they're seeing the benefits of this approach, in terms of lower poverty, increased prosperity and ongoing stability.

Lula didn't get there by waving around a copy of The Road to Serfdom. It's taken a whole lot of pragmatism and political touch, and obviously there have been many problems. But little by little Brazilians are making new symbolic connections. The left, Brazilians are learning, can bring ordem e progresso.

Politically, can we get there? It's hard to imagine, isn't it? The oil cycle conspires against it. But it's just imaginable that in the next few years, when the next oil bust catches up with Chavez - as it inevitably must - people will start seriously looking for alternatives. If we're lucky, someone will emerge at that point with the political skills to take charge of the situation. Again, though, futurology is malapaga...

Before closing this interview I would like to go back to something you said early, about "triangulating" the campaign. One implication would have been to forget the cherished unity dream and run two candidates against Chavez, one for the traditional set and a new one with whatever ideas they can come up with. If this idea has some merits inasmuch as building a viable alternative, it also implies making it easier for Chavez to remain in office for the time being. I will not go into the totalitarian wanna-beism of chavismo and limit myself to point out that chavismo is more of a later day Peronismo still in search of its Evita. Do you think that the opposition mistakes are making possible for chavismo to become a new Peronismo? After all, one of the big success of Peronismo is that the Argentinean democratic opposition in 60 years has not been able to find a counter strategy, a common front and this has allowed Peronismo to play the pseudo-democratic game with all the nefarious consequences for Argentina that we all know. Are we about to be saddled with a political movement that will cyclically break down structures for at least half a century?

I agree that this is a problem. In order to be competitive with Chavez you need to find a challenger that can bring together traditional oppo voters and the NiNi set. And this is hard: the kinds of messages that appeal to one group turns the other group off. Over the last year, we've had two candidates who've tried to build a NiNi-friendly message - Roberto Smith and Benjamin Rausseo - but one of them was too serious and not charming enough and the other was too charming and not serious enough. Both got outflanked by Rosales, who consolidated the opposition base at the cost of positioning himself in a space that's just not appealing to NiNis.

The reason I'm so frustrated is that I think we're doing it backward. What we needed was a candidate who staked out his appeal to NiNis first and then set out to win over the traditional anti-Chavez vote. That's relatively easy: traditional anti-Chavez voters will line up behind pretty much anyone who can take the fight to Chavez. What we got was a guy who started out as the candidate of the unified anti-Chavez political class and then set out to win over NiNis. But that's hard: the very fact that the traditional oppo political class supports Rosales is enough to gave many NiNis cold feet.

The problem, as I see it, is that the traditional opposition always mistakes itself for the country at large. Traditional anti-Chavez voters haven't quite grasped that the kind of positioning that's likely to appeal to them is not likely to appeal to the politically uncommitted voters who decide elections. Worse, it turns them off.

Just this week, we saw Rosales welcoming an endorsement from Oswaldo Alvarez Paz, for God's sake, and I have to wonder how many of the Rosalistas who saw that story and felt good about it stopped to reflect that adding another traditional oppo figure to Rosales's coterie is more likely to turn off swing voters than it is to win them over. So I find myself, not for the first time, screaming at my computer screen: "you idiot! if you want to shake up this race, you have to pick a fight with the Alvarez Pazes of the world, not accept their endorsements!"

We're not used to thinking that way. Maybe we're just not macchiavelian enough. Again and again, we make the same mistake: we think from our point of view. We don't stop to think things through from the point of view of the voters who will actually decide things.

It has been nice to disagree with you. Still, one last question begs to be asked: assuming that you are registered to vote in The Hague, can Rosales count on your vote anyway?

Of course!