Word: populists
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...King of Spain were to tell them publicly to "shut up." But then, few heads of state are as skillful as Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez at turning a foreign diplomatic rebuke to domestic political advantage. Chávez's radical left-wing rule resides in his populist challenge to "imperialist" threats - and what more convenient symbol of colonial oppression for Chávez (besides his favorite, the U.S.) than the Spanish throne, which plundered South America for three centuries before it was thrown out in the 1800s by Venezuelan "Liberator" Simón Bolívar, the namesake...
...party. In exchange, Bhutto would have been cleared of as of yet unanswered corruption charges (which she claims were politically motivated), permitted to return after eight years in exile, and allowed to run for the office of Prime Minister, which many assume the populist leader would have easily clinched. Some Pakistanis see her as desperate to be free from those corruption charges. Others say she will do anything to regain power, even if it means making a deal with a dictator. The lack of a popular turnout at today's protests...
...triumph for Calderón. His performance outclassed Mexico's usual disaster response (after the 1985 earthquake, the public basically had to rescue itself while officials tried to underplay the casualties). It also helped Calderón show he cares about poor people in the south, the home turf of his populist rival Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who still tours the country calling himself the "legitimate President...
Those Rocky Mountains are getting higher. Two municipalities - Denver, Colorado, and the small town of Hailey, Idaho - passed pro-marijuana measures on election day this week, joining a growing number of liberal localities that are reducing or removing penalties on using pot. It's part of a slowly evolving populist rehabilitation of the drug. San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Monica in California, along with Missoula, Montana, and Seattle, Washington, have previously passed laws that give the lowest priority to enforcing existing marijuana laws...
...Senator Clinton has trouble on the left as well, especially in a Democratic primary. The Clintons were always perceived, especially by the populist labor left, as Wall Street fellow travelers on issues like free trade and fiscal conservatism. They were seen as ideological trimmers, betraying the interests of the working class. These days, after seven years of Bush extremism, there is a fury in the Democratic base, an impatience with compromise - with The Politics of Parsing, as Edwards put it in a devastating webcast about Clinton's performance in the Oct. 30 debate. And so, when Hillary Clinton...