Who is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador?
Selfless man of the people?
Threatening wild man of the left?
A would-be authoritarian with a messiah complex?
Depends on who you ask.

A dapper young businessman in a swanky shopping district calls Lopez Obrador "another Chavez," echoing a tough ad from the PAN [National Action Party] candidate Felipe Calderon comparing Lopez Obrador to the Venezuelan president; an ad Mexico's independent electoral commission forced off the air. A university student on the same street called the PRD candidate "crazy," a politician who will bankrupt the country.

Political scientist Luis Rubio told me the candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution is neither crazy nor another Hugo Chavez. What he is, Rubio said, is a man who would turn back the clock by putting the federal government back at the center of Mexican life. Rubio said Lopez Obrador has enjoyed popular adulation as a presidential candidate because he is the candidate who has most clearly identified the central problems of the majority of his countrymen. The only drawback, Rubio says, is that Lopez Obrador's answers to the problems of widespread underemployment, low wages, and severe dislocation in the countryside following the opening of the market to American corn and beans, threaten to make the country's problems worse.

But Wednesday night, when all candidates had to shut down the active public phase of their campaigns, when Lopez Obrador talked about the need to protect domestic agricultural products he got a huge hand. It's worth remembering that corn, in ancient Mexican legend, was a gift from the gods -- the staple food, the tortilla, is made from corn flour -- so it's more than some abstract economic question whether Mexican farmers can make a living growing corn: it's a deeply symbolic question that goes to the heart of who Mexicans think they are.

The people who thronged Mexico City's central square, the Zocalo, don't get to print op-eds in Mexican newspapers, much less in The New York Times. They don't get to talk to scholars from think tanks, or produce television commercials that deliver a punch to the gut of their political opponents. When Lopez Obrador talked about the exploitation of the poor, about breaking the grip of nepotism on government and business, about access to higher education for students from poor families, tens of thousands cheered, not hesitating to count the cost to the central government or wondering about the inflationary threats of a larger public deficit. All they know is that after 72 years of the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party], and six years of Vicente Fox and the PAN, they still feel no closer to higher wages, personal security, and steady jobs.

They do know of Lopez Obrador's campaign slogan -- to do good for all, but first for the poor. Not all the supporters of the former mayor of Mexico City are poor, just as not all the supporters of Felipe Calderon are well off. But Lopez Obrador has taken the greatest helpings of tough criticism -- speculation that his election will lead to money and investment flying out of the country.
That he will create a messianic government centering power on himself.
That he'll balloon the debt, isolate Mexico economically and erase the economic gains of recent years.

So Wednesday night, ringing down the curtain on his crusade for the presidency that began years ago, he sought to speak to Mexicans well beyond the boundaries of the Zocalo, promising stability, fiscal responsibility, social peace and an end to corruption.

Luis Rubio said a Mexico striving to thrive in a global economy can't afford a president who has hardly ever been out of the country, never been to the United States and rails against the North American Free Trade Act. For his part, the PAN candidate, Calderon, has promised to continue the Fox policies that have delivered steady, if unspectacular, years of economic growth, stability in the currency and international confidence in Mexico's ability to manage its economic affairs.

Immigrant rights activist Primitivo Rodriguez told me that as southerners from the state of Tabasco, Lopez Obrador and the PRI candidate, Roberto Madrazo, might not have the best feel for the impact of immigration on small towns across Mexico that have sent hundreds of thousands of ambitious and hard-working young people north to the United States to enrich the Gross Domestic Product of another country.

Make no mistake, while immigration is THE issue involving Mexico in the United States, it is hardly front and center in the political discourse here. Rather than calling the economic migrants "heroes" as Vicente Fox did at the beginning of his term, Primitivo Rodriguez went so far as to call the migrants Mexico's shame, since so many head north reluctantly, forced to do so by the lack of work at decent wages.

The United States is rarely mentioned in the stump speeches of the leading candidates, even though the bilateral relationship between Mexico and its huge neighbor, its No. 1 export market, is the most important relationship the country has. The Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz lamented almost a century ago -- Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States! As millions in the United States wring their hands about how close Mexico has moved to their own homes in Oregon, North Carolina, Virginia and New Jersey. Who becomes the next president will have consequences most Americans haven't even begun to contemplate.

I'll have more on Sunday's election from Mexico City tomorrow.

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