by Marc Lifsher
The Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2003

Venezuela's embattled private sector is banking on the colorful U.S. political consultant James Carville to help oust leftist President Hugo Chavez. The hire may herald an effort by the anti-Chavistas to focus more on the issues than on personality.

According to several individuals with knowledge of the matter, a group of business executives contracted with Mr. Carville this year to craft a strategy that will unify a fractious and frustrated Chavez opposition and resonate with voters in a possible recall referendum. The executives are hoping that Mr. Carvillethe folksy, 59-year-old Democratic Party consultant from Louisiana known as the Ragin' Cajunwill push a variation of his "It's the economy, stupid" theme that helped propel Bill Clinton to victory in 1992. But analysts say Mr. Carville and his clients face a formidable challenge.

Mr. Chavez has strengthened his hand since surviving a military coup in April 2002 and defeating a recent two-month national strike led by oil executives, labor leaders and business organizations. Despite a deepening economic recession, the business elite here and its middle-class allies are finding it hard to persuade core Chavez supporters in urban slums and the countryside that the president isn't delivering on his populist promises.

They have another hurdle to jump in blaming all the country's economic problems on Mr. Chavez after their own ill-starred strike accelerated the economy's slide. "These business owners are arrogant. They can bring Carville or anyone else, but they don't stop to understand what everyday life is like for the people," says Patricia Marquez, an anthropologist and academic director of the Institute for Higher Administrative Studies, a graduate school of management here in the capital.

Everyday life is tough. Venezuela's economy contracted by 8.9% last year and is expected to shrink by 10% to 20% this year. More than half of all workers survive doing odd jobs or selling wares in street markets, and at least one in five in the so-called formal economythose who have full-time jobs with benefitsis unemployed. Inflation topped 30% last year and could reach 50% in 2003. Meanwhile, government foreign-exchange curbs and price controls have dried up imports and threaten to create shortages in basic foods and medicines.

Mr. Carville's strategy, according to a U.S. business executive who talked to him, is three-pronged: focus on the economy, hammer away at the need for the referendumand avoid personal attacks on the charismatic and politically agile Mr. Chavez. "The message should be that everything [in the economy] is a wreck," says the executive. "Don't engage Chavez. Engage the facts."

The executive adds that Mr. Carville is advising the opposition to "knock off the day-to-day demonstrations" that filled the streets of Caracas over the Christmas and New Year season. Instead, the opposition must "keep drilling the message of the referendum, energize the people and drive Chavez crazy," he quotes Mr. Carville as saying.

Mr. Carville didn't respond to several telephone and e-mail requests for comment. He frequently consults abroad, in 1999 working on the successful Israeli prime ministerial campaign of Ehud Barak, along with Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a Washington polling firm that works closely with him. According to his Web site, since 1992 he has consulted for political candidates in at least 10 foreign countries in Latin America, Canada, Europe and the Middle East.

Greenberg says it has been conducting surveys for a group of businessmen coordinated by Marcel Granier, a television broadcast executive and an important leader of the Venezuelan opposition. "We have an association with Mr. Carville going back to the Clinton days," says Mark Feierstein, a Greenberg associate vice president, who has been making regular consulting trips to Venezuela.

The referendum derives from Venezuela's 1999 constitution, drafted according to Mr. Chavez's instructions. The law states that voters can gather signatures for a recall vote on an elected officeholder midway through his or her term. For Mr. Chavez, that's Aug. 19. If more people vote against him than voted for him in 2000, when he garnered some 3.7 million ballots, a fresh presidential election is to follow in 30 days. It isn't clear whether Mr. Chavez would be allowed to run again.

In a survey of 1,000 Venezuelan adults that Greenberg released in late March, 59% of likely voters said they would vote to revoke Mr. Chavez's mandate. Mr. Chavez has said that he supports the concept of a referendumif the opposition meets all the constitutional requirementsand that he will triumph in any such vote. Opponents, as well as many independent analysts, anticipate that the president will do everything possible to manipulate the political and legal system to delay or thwart a vote.