Chavez’s speech

One can listen to it here in Spanish. The full text is not yet available:

“To those who voted for my proposal and to those who voted against my proposal, I thank you and congratulate you, because you have proven that this is the path. I hope we forget forever the leaps into the void, the roads of violence, of destabilization.” He did little bows as he thanked people, with a perhaps unintentionally comic but very agreeable effect.

He told a homely, but touching anecdote of an election in 1978. He was in a small town. It was raining heavily, so he asked for his soldiers to be allowed to stand indoors, in the “sala” (lit.: living room) where they happened to be counting votes. The symbol on the ballot for the Communist Party was a red rooster, and their slogan was “cock-a-doodle-doo!”. In this little town, there were a handful of votes for the Communists, maybe eight or ten. But every time the guy counting the ballots saw one, he’d say. “Cock-a-doodle do! This one’s for me!” and he’d toss it out. Chavez said he almost got arrested because he got visibly upset with the blatant dishonesty of it all. It was in this context that he explained why he did not prolong the vote counting in hopes of extracting the result he wanted: more important than the result is the confidence of people in their elections.

He reminded them that in 1992, February 4, as he was engaged in a coup against the government, a coup which had the outright support of half the population, he had ended the attempt and submitted himself to imprisonment, joking, “For now, we can’t.” The implication is that people need to be patient and wait for circumstances to emerge where the objectives can be attained peacefully.

He did a very cute short skit in Spanglish of his conversation with Fidel Castro: “Jau arr yuu?” “Ayam veri guell.” In the context of the political speech regarding a major political defeat, it was truly funny.

And he pointed out to his followers the reason they had lost. Paraphrasing: “A year ago, they voted for me, how many? 7,300,000 And for the oppposition, 4,100,000. The opposition increased votes 400,000. We fell to 4,300,000.” We have to look at the reasons. I think, I feel confident that the three million we lost remain with us, but they had doubts or fears. We need to pay attention to why.”

He said his party needs to broaden, deepen, and widen their perspective. He quoted Bolivar 1896 to the effect that everything is “subject to error and seduction,” but for the “judgment of the people which is pure.”

I especially like that last point. As each of our flawed perceptions are together refracted through the lens of debate and choice, they are somehow improved and purified of error. It is by accepting the worth of one another that we transcend our limited selves.

Like all political speeches, it contained a fair amount of gas. But one could see the character of the man in a way that press accounts, even favorable ones, obscure. This is a man who understands his own limitations and can laugh at them. The last time I saw that humility in American elections was in 1992, when Bush the First in one of his yipping poodle moments called Clinton “Bozo.” Clinton’s response–Big Dog, we miss you– was to the effect that, “It’s ok if I make people laugh. I’ll never make them cry.”