Caracas Chronicles

Panel one: “Not sure whether to go vote or not…”
Panel three: Cadena announcement… “It’s decided…I’m going to vote!”

Venezuela: “I could use a little help over here!”
Chávez: “Quit bugging me, I’m on cadena.“

Quico says: Looking at editorial cartoons like these, I have to wonder if Chávez’s idiot decision to run an hours’ long cadena in the middle of a natural disaster might not provide the kind of lifeline opposition hopeful Antonio Ledezma needed to pull off a dramatic, come-from-behind win in the race for Metropolitan Mayor of Caracas.

I mean, that cadena was a disaster. Commandeering the airwaves, all the airwaves, for an unrelated rant, at a time when people needed up-to-the-minute information as a matter of life or death…that just crystallizes everything that’s gone wrong with the revolutionary dream.

Chávez se olvidó del pueblo!

The guy’s off doing his own thing. Your problems just don’t rank all that high in his list of concerns, not even when they’re something quite as dire, quite as immediate, as needing to know whether you’re about to get washed away by a flash flood in the next few seconds.

That cadena was Fat Man in a Palace Syndrome made visible in its starkest, most dramatic terms. I refuse to believe chavismo won’t take an electoral hit for it.

Will it be enough? As recently as a week ago, Ledezma was pretty far behind. Veremos.