Wordle Daily Goes to CDMX

Michelle Goldberg shows how terrible our pundit "frames" are for understanding politics with her embarrassingly bad piece on Claudia Sheinbaum

Author

mister mix
April 04, 2025

Reader R decided to raise my blood pressure and keep me from other projects by pointing out this piece in the NYT about Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum: Is Claudia Sheinbaum the Anti-Trump? (To be clear, I’m joking, I appreciate everyone who sends me things.)

Whenever a piece is headlined with a question, the answer is no and this piece is no exception. Let’s begin with the fact, pooh-poohed by Goldberg in the piece, that Claudia is the most popular democratically-elected head of state on earth (80% approval). You can see how it’s going to go when she calls Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) a “flamboyantly disruptive left-wing leader.” Claudia is “a secular Jewish climate scientist” and “part of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia typically demonized by populist movements”. How did this Oscar and Felicia couple ever work out?

Of course, totally missing from the piece is the context of AMLO’s rise to power and two failed elections full of irregularities before he finally won in 2018. He replaced the grossly corrupt string of leaders from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and National Action Party (PAN), and he showed a country that had been stifled by their corrupt rule that there can be another way, the party he founded, Morena. Yeah, he’s a weirdo, he holds grudges, he’s thin skinned, his kid is corrupt, but people crazy enough to try to beat a pair of parties that had been in power for almost 100 years have to be a little crazy in other ways. Since the letters “PRI” and “PAN” don’t exist in Michelle’s piece, there’s no need to mention the massive accomplishment of this rather odd man from Tabasco.

For Goldberg, AMLO is just a “populist”, and his popularity isn’t because of his historic achievement, it’s because, in her world, he was crass enough to actually do something for the Mexican people. What really chaps her hide is this:

As president, López Obrador more than doubled the minimum wage and pegged it to inflation to ensure that workers wouldn’t fall behind. He enacted broad social programs, including stipends for young people doing job training and, most important, universal cash transfers for the elderly. According to Mexico’s National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy, five million Mexicans escaped poverty during the first four years of his presidency. (Extreme poverty, however, increased by nearly half a million.)

He let the poors have a living wage, and the olds money! And he did it not with means-tested convoluted programs, he used cash!

Since this must be bad, per pundit rules, Goldberg points out that the Mexican deficit grew during AMLO’s presidency. She claims economic growth was slow. Well, a little thing called COVID hit Mexico in 2020, but when AMLO entered office, GDP growth was around 2%, and post-2020, 6%, 3.7% and 3.2%, per the World Bank. So it looks like when you average it out, he added 1% to GDP growth. She say that “healthcare declined precipitously” under AMLO’s rule. Mexico’s ranking in the World Healthcare Index went from 29th when he entered office, to 21st when he left. Mexican unemployment is 2.7%. It seems that the bad things of a decent wage and giving the elderly money didn’t do as much damage as Goldberg would have us believe.

Then Goldberg, traveling from a city ruled by Eric Adams, in a country led by a coup leader who couldn’t be jailed, has the gall to start questioning Mexico’s democracy. She characterizes AMLO’s backing of having an elected judiciary as “straight from the authoritarian playbook” and checks Turkey, Hungary and Israel as examples. Let’s see what the Wilson Center says about that:

Most Mexicans do not trust their judicial system due to rampant corruption, nepotism, and subservience to monied interests in both the federal and local judiciaries. The courts have been utterly incapable of addressing the impunity, insecurity, and violence that principally afflicts the poorest sectors of society, denying justice to those who cannot afford it, while providing swift recourse to those who can. 

It is a system which purports to be a meritocracy through its structured "judicial career path,” but is actually dominated by a few families with strongholds in the judiciary, and key positions are obtained through influence-peddling and the sale or distribution of exam answers to the well-connected in selection processes. The exams themselves are outdated, geared toward rote memorization, and biased (particularly at the oral stage), systematically excluding women and minorities. In a nation with profound economic inequalities, the result is a judiciary that represents only a tiny fraction of Mexican society and its views on the law. At the local level, less than a third of the states have merit-based evaluations for judicial vacancies. 

Since facts aren’t going to work (even if Goldberg is willing to make them up), it’s time for more vibes. Goldberg asks if “Claudia’s more technocratic temperament will lead to more liberal governance.” (Of course, her definition of “liberal” isn’t clearly stated, it’s vibes.). Here’s some of Claudia’s “technocratic temperament”:

This was at the groundbreaking for a new hospital last weekend in San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, after she had attended the dedication of a new hospital in Ensenada, Baja. (More evidence of the horrors of Mexican healthcare under Morena, obviously.) Every weekend she’s out in the countryside somewhere, without visible security, hugging people out of the open window of her car, and taking selfies. But since she has a PhD, she must have a “technocratic temperament”. Jesus wept.

What happened here: a stupid gringo who doesn’t know shit about Mexico flew to Mexico City, sought out people who would confirm her priors about Mexico, and probably had some good tacos and margs. She totally misses the possibility that Morena is doing something extraordinary. And she completely doesn’t get the generational political talents of Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo.

The issue with Goldberg isn’t just her terrible reporting, it’s that our broken democracy is going to need a Morena-like effort to recover, and all of her pundit instincts will rebel at that effort. In ways similar to Claudia, AMLO and Morena, we’ll be faced with a government full of rot, an economy destroyed by stupidity, and bad relationships with some of our former allies. The things it will take to recover from this will give the Goldbergs of the world — supposed “liberals” — a real case of the ick. We’ll be considered “leftists.” The deficit will be a sudden concern. And how can the “technocratic” (read: competent) new President connect with the American people? Mexico was just a warmup for this pundit-brained, fact-deficient “reporter”.

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