Framed choice

On October 7th, the Venezuelan people get to choose between this:

and this:

What’s for sure is that we’re heading into the weirdest, most volatile campaign in living memory.

As October 7th draws nearer, Chávez’s invisibility is going to become harder and harder to explain. The pressure to put him in front of the cameras, whatever state he’s in, is going to get more and more immense. Daily, his campaign handlers are going to have to sit there, size him up, and ask themselves: does it help or hurt to put him out there looking like this?

To me, this spells huge volatility and unpredictability. His die-hard followers will fall into line, of course, but I just don’t know how Swing Voters are going to react to a dying Chávez asking them for their votes. And all of that is assuming he gets to October 7th, which is by no means a settled proposition.

We’re looking at four months of imponderables now. The one thing we can pretty much discard, though, is stability over the next 12 months.