leftist tsunami?

In today's column, Andres Oppenheimer quickly touches on a good point about the Latin-American left, and that is, how old and retrograde it is. I keep thinking that there are moderate progressives somewhere down there, but I can't think of any in recent memory. And the voters are noticing, in the Mexico election, for example, younger voters went with Calderon by a decent margin.

Second, Mexico's left has to modernize because it is becoming the party of older people and rural dwellers in a country that is increasingly young and urban. According to exit polls by the dailies Reforma and El Universal, a majority of young voters supported Calderón, while a majority of older voters supported López Obrador.

Among voters age 18 to 29, Calderón got 38 percent of the vote, while his leftist rival got 34 percent. Conversely, among voters age 50 and older, López Obrador got 37 percent of the vote, while Calderón got 34 percent, the Reforma exit poll shows.

This isn't very surprising when you look at the rhetoric that's coming out of Latin America's leftists leaders. There was a time when young people would have supported hacks like Chavez and Morales, solely on the merit of their vapid attacks, but times have changed, and now they have to rely on aging revolutionaries.

Which brings us to another very good point by Oppenheimer, in the latest elections in Latin America--Mexico, Canada, Peru, Colombia and Costa Rica--the winner has been the center-right candidate.

Oppenheimer talks about the end of the "leftist tsunami", but I'd like to think there was no such thing, and the couple of elections won by the radical left were just an abnormal blip in the historical timeline.

In a personal note, it's really amazing that I dislike the Latin-American left, almost as much as I do the American right. Go figure.