If National Action Party candidate Felipe Calderon won the presidential election in Mexico, then why is it that his main opponent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is the one making headlines? Mostly because he can. The candidate for the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) has become a media magnet, with a knack for drawing crowds and luring the press. Where he goes, people follow. What he says, the media repeat.

Three weeks after the election, there was no official word on who the winner is. The Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) released the final vote count, virtually declaring Calderon the winner, with 244,000 votes over his opponent. The final tally was 35.88 percent for Calderon and 35.31 percent for Lopez Obrador -- a very close race, which the losing candidate refused to concede.

He has declared fraud and is asking the Electoral Tribunal -- the only institution authorized to declare the winner -- to order a recount, vote by vote. As I wrote this column, the Electoral Tribunal was still reviewing complaints of irregularities from all parties involved.

Since the election results were announced, Calderon has been going about his business as the winner. He received calls from heads of state such as President George Bush and the head of the Spanish government, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. Calderon has begun to form a transition team and has selected some members of his future cabinet. But it’s Lopez Obrador, not Calderon, making news.

The leftist candidate has been staging massive protests and marches along the streets of Mexico City. He has been making incendiary comments to the press. Has accused the government of Vicente Fox and the business sector of conspiring against him to make him lose the election, and has even indirectly threatened Calderon and his family.

Many in Mexico see it as a desperate move by a failed politician who’s refusing to face reality. A recent poll shows that 60 percent of Mexicans are against a recount. But Lopez Obrador and many of his millions of followers seem to be convinced that the victory was stolen from them. He has vowed civil disobedience until he is declared the winner. As a matter of fact, he has claimed that even if a recount shows that he lost the election, he will still consider himself the winner. In his view, there was fraud from the start in what he calls an uneven playing field with a dirty ad campaign.

These are not new allegations coming from Lopez Obrador, and he didn’t become a media star overnight. In the mid-’80s, the former militant of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) joined the left-leaning movement that eventually became the PRD. His rise to the national scene came after he lost his second gubernatorial bid in 1996 to PRI’s Roberto Madrazo in his home state of Tabasco. He declared fraud and, yes, you guessed it, led massive protests and called for civil disobedience.

In 2000, Lopez Obrador triumphantly re-entered the political scene as a strong mayor of Mexico City, becoming President Vicente Fox’s political rival. As mayor, he instituted a daily press conference at 6 a.m. It is his belief that he who rises early gets all the luck.

I don’t know how much luck his early-bird pressers brought him, but he often did end up stealing the limelight. It seemed as if it was Obrador, not Fox, who set the agenda for the topic of the day. By the time Fox was on the public scene, he was confronted by journalists asking him to respond to Lopez Obrador’s comments of the day.

His tenure as mayor also brought the leftist politician some bad press. He was sued and investigated for questionable -- including some illegal -- actions by either him or his staff. But his lucky early-bird star must have been watching over him, because in every instance he came out clean.