Saturday, February 11, 2012

A short note from Alek Boyd: Lopez as the king maker

I had a brief exchange with Alek Boyd about Leopoldo action, and asked him to put it as a guest post.  There it is.
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Leopoldo Lopez: opposition king maker


It is encouraging to see fellow blogger Daniel keeping the new political actors of Venezuela honest. Our country suffers too much from caudillismo, and it is only independent and critical bloggers, whose lives don't depend on a paycheck from traditional media, the ones doing proper questioning these days. I like the fact that Daniel asked Leopoldo about internet and his new role within the opposition unity umbrella. As I wrote in the past, if he played his cards right, Leopoldo would become a king maker of sorts.

His decision of "anotarse a ganador" as we say, is the most elegant option for him, and, more importantly, for the opposition. The Capriles-Lopez duet should be a force to be reckoned with: on the one hand, the softly, let's-not-rub-any-chavista-feather approach of Capriles, coupled with Leopoldo's impressive ability to gather volunteers, from the grass roots up, would be, had Venezuela been a normal, functioning democracy, a winning ticket. The country not being a normal, functioning democracy, is a post for some other day though.

Nonetheless, while I send Kudos to Daniel on his interview, I would like to pat myself in the back by saying that Leopoldo played the only hand he could, under the circumstances, and indeed has become, as predicted, the king maker.

[OK, Alek went on heavy on the praise but it is so rare for Alek to praise anything..... Never mind that he predicted the endorsement of Leopoldo the first, in a way]

5 comments:

  1. too bad that after all the hyping of his favourite candidate, that after all the political posts he has written over the years, alek ducks from his civic responsibility during the primary elections. I guess elegance has its limits, and for some, it is only a word.

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  2. Go figure! Agreed than is kinda weird, but Leopoldo has made some improvements to the political scene, even before endorsing HCR. I just wished he created VP earlier after he left PJ and not joined UNT. Maybe history might be different.

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  3. As the curtain falls and we stand before one more important event in time, I would like to congratulate both Daniel and Alek for their many incisive analyses over the years.

    It takes time, effort and a great deal of caring and commitment to look into the murky ,and confused world of politics in Venezuela and attempt to sort out the truth from fiction and lastly to write about the findings in the face of much criticism.

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  4. Milonga1:55 PM

    I make Firepigette's words mine. That was really a great deal of caring and commitment. I'm worried with Alek's last post calling today's election an exercise in futility. "They should be planning instead how to man every last polling station in the country, especially those in rural Venezuela, where thousands of phantom voters keep giving Chavez 100% of the vote. They should be ensuring that whatever the CNE announces is a true reflection of the people's vote, and not an unaudited, cooked result of CNE-controlled Smartmatics that only a fool like Jimmy Carter would vouch for. Until that happens, none of them stands a chance..." I'm afraid I'm equally pesimistic. How about you, Dano?

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    Replies
    1. I am not. That does not make me an optimist but there too many things going on to be negative just because X or Y.

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