Wednesday 19 August 2009

Chutzpah

There is a joke that the definition of chutzpah is the child who, accused for murdering his parents, pleads for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.

Another definition is MEO's assertion that he is Bachelet's natural heir.

On the one hand he is not wrong. There is, or was, in the early part of the Bachelet government, an element of populism. Gobierno ciudadano was, among other things, clearly a way of bypassing her rocky relationship with the political parties.

Yet despite this rocky relationship, Bachelet never struck out on her own, and never would have dreamed of doing so. MEO's problem is not his analysis -- that the Concertación and its parties suffer from a number of (perhaps fatal) maladies -- it is in his solution. To throw the baby out with the bathwater is a Chavista proposal. Bachelet hoped to push for inclusion from within. It didn't work out, not because her approach was flawed, but because she got sidetracked by the Pinguinos and Transantiago.

Gobierno ciudadano never looked so good.
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