It was another beautiful day today in the capital, Mexico City. We began our morning in the Zocalo, the central plaza of Mexico City, and as such the central plaza of Mexico itself. At times of national celebration, and national commotion, people flock to the vast square, big enough to fit eight American football fields. This morning one group of workers hurried to spruce up the square for the coming conclusion of the presidential campaign, while another group banged risers, stands, and shelters together for the world's media, getting ready to descend on the square with partisans of the new president -- whoever that ends up being.

Along one side of the square, running for some 200 yards, is the national palace, and along another side, Metropolitan Cathedral, the largest Catholic church in this largely Catholic country. Workers were busy there, too, painters sprucing up wooden altars, and conservators doing the painstaking small scale work of cleaning and refreshing the many paintings stuffed into the niches of chapels, and softly brushing gold leaf onto the resplendent retablos containing saints relics, and precious historic objects, like an ancient stone bowl where, a modest label maintains, St. Phillip, martyr and early leader of the church was baptized into the Christian faith.

There is something comforting about passing from the din of the Zocalo, banging and sawing and honking horns, and its blinding sunlight, into the cool, dark church. It was built above the ruins of the palaces and temples of the Aztec emperors, a potent symbol of one empires descent, and the symbols of authority of a new empire rising in its place on sacred ground. The short, dark Indian ladies, long braids down their backs, praying in the chapels lining the cathedral walls are the descendants of the Mexicans who built a deep and abiding faith in Jesus, and his beloved mother Mary. Tradition says the Virgin Mary appeared in brown skin to the Indian Juan Diego in 1531, just 10 years after the Spanish conquest. Almost 500 years later, Our Lady of Guadeloupe is seen everywhere in Mexico -- in roadside shrines, on bumper stickers, in shopkeepers' stalls and on T-shirts. She is the patron saint of this city, this vast, crowded, amazing country.

Not far from the Zocalo, in the shadow of the Monument of the Revolution, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, threw a rally for its candidate for president, Roberto Madrazo, who is also the party president. Trade unionists, school kids, party volunteers, and oil workers, the Petroleros from the state-owned energy company Pemex, came to cheer the party that ran Mexico without interruption from the '20s to the year 2000, when the National Action Party and Vicente Fox broke their streak.

It is a funny moment for the PRI. It is at one moment a spent force, sapped of the unassailable power it held for decades, and at the same time still very much a potent force in national life, holding the plurality of seats in the national assembly, a majority of the governorships of Mexico's 31 states. Pollsters have reported from the very beginning of the campaign season that Roberto Madrazo is running well behind his right of center opponent from the PAN, Felipe Calderon, and his left of center rival from the PRD, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

A party member all his life, Madrazo is the son of a party president. In the old days, he might have become president quite easily, chosen by a tap from the finger of his predecessor. This anointing of a candidate, called the "dedazo," the finger, oversaw decades of PRI dominance. Now Madrazo has to fight hard to keep his party in the spotlight, pleading with his countrymen for another chance at power after the PRI eviction in 2000.

It's a challenging balancing act. Redefine what has historically been a party of government, a party of power, rather than ideology, the party of the center in Mexican life. A powerful dispenser of patronage jobs, contracts, and privilege, the PRI did not make Mexicans wealthy, secure, or healthy in seven decades of power. So, cheered on by the party faithful, Madrazo tries to evoke a great past of the PRI, reaching back well before the lifetimes of the people in the crowd to the Mexican Revolution, the ten year conflict that ended in 1920 with the rise of the PRI.

We are the party of revolution, Madrazo tells the PRI faithful and their electoral partners from Mexico's small Green Party, and at the same time, we are the party of the safe center, unlike the rightists of the PAN, and the leftists of the PRD.

Madrazo is keeping a grueling campaign schedule, his voice is strained by campaigning, he'll run right up to the wire, that is, Wednesday night, when all active, public campaigning stops in advance of Sunday's balloting. He may be trailing, but he also can boost the fortunes of scores of PRI candidates for the legislatures, state governorships, and mayors. The Madrazo posters around the country promise more security, more jobs, and less poverty for Mexico under the PRI, but the candidate never mentions why or how the PRI couldn't deliver any of that before, or what he would do to deliver it now.

Leaving aside the message, the rally is an extremely competent production -- big screen projectors beam the candidate's image across the landmark square, the catchy campaign song plays as the candidate presses the flesh, confetti in Mexico's red, white, and green colors shoots from cannons, and flutters from firework bombs exploding overhead. Buses line the avenues approaching the square, waiting to carry away the large crowd when the rally is done.

If the rally was all you saw, you might conclude that Madrazo is a popular contender, leading a confident party into the weekend vote. But the PRI has been the big loser in Mexico's march to competitive democracy.

Upper middle class voters we spoke to later in the day want to keep the PAN in the presidential mansion, Los Pinos. In a more modest neighborhood support for the former mayor of the capital, Obrador, is strong.

Maybe 15 miles away, just past the international airport, the Basureros, the garbage people we spoke to, don't think any new presidency is going to change their lives much. They live in homes that are piles of discarded materials pulled from the nearby dumps. As flies buzzed around our heads, and the stench grabbed the back of your throat, a woman who made her living picking garbage for 20 years showed me her home… a place without electricity or running water, without schools for the children of the Basureros, a place where she lives fully convinced that the country's leaders don't know, and don't care about her. When I asked her what she would ask from the next president if she could talk to him she said, we need help.

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