Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s foreign advisory team, based at the Miraflores presidential palace, are deep into the task of getting him reelected for the third time, something they may succeed at, given Chavez’s manipulation of the electoral system. Yes, you heard right, foreign as in foreigner. Which sounds pretty disgusting. Shouldn’t one be a citizen of a country before one messes around with its campaigns? Not in Chavismo.

That’s why the Chavista campaign team has such an unusual obsession with foreign affairs, something that Miguel at Devil’s Excrement notices. But it’s not all that unusual, in my opinion, it’s simply because they themselves are foreign!

In Miguel’s post here, he notes that the Chavistas have now released a paranoid-looking list of all the things they think the opposition will go after them for, and almost all of it is foreign issues that very few poor Venezuelans, who are potential voters, really care about.

It just goes to show how out of touch and in the clutches of his foreign advisors Chavez is. And by foreign, I do mean non-Venezuelans – sophisticated people from Canada and the U.S. and other Sandalistas who have been diligently organizing Chavez’s back-to-back Axis of Evil world tours, which have taken up more than a full year of Chavez’s eight-year presidency.

But back home, the Venezuelan opposition has united as never before under the candidacy of Manuel Rosales, governor of independent-minded Zulia state. If you are unfamiliar with his appeal and the strong showing he is bringing forward, check out Alek Boyd’s excellent primer at Pajamas Media on this dramatic challenge to Chavismo. Rosales is not talking about foreign affairs – after all, he doesn’t have any foreign advisors, and being a governor, he has mainly domestic interests.

All of that appeals to voters, who care about bread and butter issues, and not which alliance Chavez managed to get himself admitted to for the glory of Venezuela. Real voters just don’t care about that. They’d much rather have a job that pays a reasonable salary and an honest cop when they need one.

Miguel points out that Chavez, obsessed as he is with foreign affairs, is starting to see the ineffectiveness of that foreign-issues strategy, or at least the rest of us are.

Chavez is having a devil of a time getting his natural constituency, the poor, to turn up at his rallies, even though booze and other goodies are often distributed and full bus service is provided. No interest. They aren’t coming to his rallies in their thousands like they used to and Miguel has the photos to prove it, here and here.
Even worse, Chavez bills his rallies as “spontaneous,” and Miguel shows that they are not that, either, with more photos proving that these rallies were just people being bused in by Chavista campaign operatives.

So Chavez’s foreign advisors can spin their wheels all they like, the one thing that is gaining traction in Venezuela is domestic issues with voters, not foreign ones. That’s why Rosales seems to be doing so well, at least compared to previous Chavez challengers.

Still, there are some cold buckets of water around. Quico at Caracas Chronicles reports that a new poll shows Rosales still trailing Chavez, and the voter bases that Rosales is appealing to remain largely untouched. It’s good food for thought before we get too excited about Rosales.

Still, I’m not gonna stop watching this election based on one single poll, which may be wrong anyway. See what you think for yourself on this here. But don’t forget to compare and contrast to these images again here.