Right from the start Roberto Madrazo confounded his friends ? and above all himself ? while delighting his enemies by becoming firmly entrenched as the show horse in a three-way race.

The vaunted political machine of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) isn't delivering. Despite its penetration into Mexico's every nook and cranny, the candidate for the "Alliance for Mexico" ? the PRI-Green Party coalition ? remains stuck with about 25 percent of popular support.

Felipe Calderón, the National Action Party (PAN) standard-bearer, wasn't supposed to even make it past the primaries. Yet he nudged past Madrazo in December to grab second place and now he's moved into the lead by the reckoning of most opinion polls.

The biggest surprise of all is the serious slippage in the campaign of long-time opinion poll leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, candidate of the coalition "For the Good of All," which unites the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the Workers' Party (PT).

What happened?

Love him or hate him, either López Obrador knows something we don't or he's committing serious errors in the way he's running his campaign.

From the standpoint of those of us outside the realm of his campaign thinking, he's making three mistakes, each one potentially fatal to his Election Day success ? micromanagement, intransigence, and denial. Errors or not, these are not traits one normally looks for in a national leader.

The left-wing weekly magazine Proceso details each of them in its April 30 edition in a series of concerned articles about its favorite candidate.

In one article it describes a PRD meeting to discuss Calderón's April surge in the polls. Those who arrived with ideas for strategic adjustments never got to present them because López Obrador announced that he would continue to direct the campaign himself, and that he had no plans to change strategy.

There are two motives for hiring a campaign manager ? to maximize the time the candidate spends campaigning and to bring in expert opinion on the best strategies.

Both Madrazo and Calderón hired campaign strategists with proven track records in the U.S., people like Dick Morris, Rob Allyn, and Alex Castellanos, all of whom helped the last four U.S. presidents get elected. Both changed tactics when their campaigns seemed to stall, and for Calderón this has worked wonders.

Despite opinion polls that show him trailing Calderón, López Obrador denies that anyone else is even close to him. He cites polls of his own showing him with 40 percent of decided voters, compared with 30 percent for Calderón and 27 percent for Madrazo.

Fair enough as far as it goes, but he won't say who conducts his polls, the wording of the questions, the size and homogeneity of the samples ? or who's footing the bill.

He accuses Calderón and the president's office of manipulating poll results, a point he can't prove and one he never raised during the two years he was undisputed head of the pack.

He refuses to accept the notion that it was a mistake not to take part in the April 25 candidates' debate, where Calderón raised his standing by looking presidential.

López Obrador operates on intuition, his sense of what the people want. That's either his strong suit or his weak one, depending on whether voters prove him right. It worked last year in the "desafuero" scandal, when his political enemies tried to nip his chance to run for president in the bud by maliciously hanging a frivolous criminal charge on him.

Even his opponents in the press supported him in his fight against a capricious interpretation of law, and now he's got his chance to become Mexico's president. Whether the same formula works in that context remains to be seen.

Like many one-man shows, López Obrador has generated problems within the party.

One of the biggest is that he's failed to gain the support of the PRD's most prestigious member ? Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a party founder and its candidate in the past three elections.

The issue, says Cuauhtémoc's son Lázaro, governor of the State of Michoacan, is López Obrador's choices of candidates for the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, some of whom are deserters from the PRI.

"It's nothing personal against him," said Lázaro. "There are people like my father and Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, who left the PRI as part of a democratic struggle: now others are arriving simply because they did not fit in the PRI lists or because it's better to ride the elevator that's going up." He said he and his father worry that this might turn the PRD into a recycled PRI.

Maybe so, but it might also be that the Cárdenas family, disappointed that Cuauhtémoc isn't the candidate this time around, is awaiting the failure of López Obrador so that Lázaro will be positioned to be the party's 2012 candidate.

There are still seven weeks before the July 2 elections ? plenty of time for more surprises. In a race as close as this one, anything can happen, especially if the candidate For the Good of All really does know something we don't.

Kenneth Emmond is a freelance journalist and economist who has lived in Mexico since 1995. Kemmond00@yahoo.com