This is how the Washington Establishment has looked at things since…well…since pretty much the beginning.

But awash in petrodollars — oil accounts for about 90 percent of Venezuelan exports — Chávez commands formidable resources. They are centered in the armed forces; a huge nomenklatura scattered across the bureaucracy and newly nationalized industries; the so-called Boliburgesía (Bolivarian bourgeoisie) of traders grown rich working the angles of a corrupt system; and the poor whom Chávez has helped and manipulated.

Certainly, the oil money Chávez has plowed into poor neighborhoods (at the expense of an oil industry suffering chronic underinvestment) has reduced poverty. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America said last year that the extreme poverty rate had fallen to 9.9 percent from 15.9 percent.

The poor and impoverished might expect their champion to reduce the extreme poverty rate 6.0%, even if, implausibly, that improvement comes at the cost of chronic underinvestment in the oil industry. That’s the kind of performance that will make a poor or impoverished person consider voting to reelect their president. But the Establishment sees this as a threat.

There is no doubt in my mind that if we were not preoccupied with the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan we would be ginning up an invasion or coup in Venezuela. We tried once already, but without conviction, and without a domestic propaganda campaign.

But Chávez’s grab for socialist-emperor status is grotesque and dangerous — as Fascism was — a terrible example for a region that has been consolidating democracy. King Juan Carlos of Spain got it right when he recently interrupted Chávez’s trademark verbal diarrhea with a brusque: “Why don’t you just shut up?”

Actually, Chavez has put his ‘grab for socialist-emperor’ on the ballot. And it’s not assured that he will win the vote:

According to opinion polls, the socialist leader could lose this Sunday’s vote amid unease over his radical policies and ambition to stay in power for decades.

Defections from his movement’s ranks and food shortages have galvanised a student-led opposition campaign which is due to climax at a final rally in downtown Caracas today.

Defeat would stymie Chávez’s effort to abolish term limits and oblige him to step down in five years.

If I lived in Venezuela I would vote against most of the 69 proposed constitutional amendments. But the American media’s hysteria about a vote is quite something. It’s almost touching.