For some time now highwayscribery has ballyhooed the candidacy of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) for the Mexican presidency.

(Yes, we do ballyhoo here).

Time and space have also been spent on events after the election, the opinion of this Web log being that something's about to happen in Mexico, something violent.

the highway scribe offered the "L.A. Weekly" to go down and hang around the tent cities that AMLO has called for and gotten from his supporters in Mexico City and elsewhere. There was no response and the scribe would like to think it's because "The Weekly" had already dispatched a well-prepared observer and journalist to the scene.

Here's a very interesting article by Daniel Hernandez called "Down and Delirious in Mexico City; a pocho among the culturistas of the D.F."Hernandez provides the 21st century artnick perspective, checking in with the known elements of a cultural surge in Mexico City that has been written about by the big boys such as the "N.Y. Times" etc. etc.

The election fiasco aside, these people, he concludes, are proof positive that Mexico is morphing into a modern, Western democracy, what with their detached and apolitical attitudes, there "homogenized" urban lifestyles, and pop-ironic fascinations.

The writer takes you through Mexico City with a middle-class family that voted for the old PRI, or Revolutionary Institutional Party, because that's who butters their bread. AMLO's Revolutionary Democratic Party, they say, are classic Mexican "socialist-capitalists" concerned both with the poor and the quality of their car.

They are upset with all the cheap goods from China on the streets of Mexico City that have supplanted local product: something that happened under Lopez Obrador's turn as mayor.

The city itself is too fun, and too sexy for the art-left class to attend the rallies in support of AMLO, whom they only tepidly supported. Many, two million nationwide, went for another left-wing candidate promising legalized marijuana, gay rights, and help for Mexico's indigenous.

The same people who abandoned Al Gore in 2000 for Ralph Nader abandoned AMLO in Mexico.

The successful left coalition is the same in both countries somebody in the article notes, perhaps novelist Francisco Goldman: minorities, unions and blue collar workers, and progressive, upscale liberals.

The betrayal, it is noted, has come from the third group in both countries.

And for all that, or maybe because of it, AMLO's problems are hiding the fact that his party is now running about half the country - the true electoral victory.

Read the piece and travel with Hernandez to the outskirts of the city to a district occupied by direct descendants of the Mexica who lived their prior to the Spaniards' arrival. Here is the node of Lopez Obrador's support and you can read the article to find out why.