Moda-ration
It wasn't anything he was saying, but everything he was wearing -- a striped sweater to his audience with King Juan Carlos in Madrid's Zarzuela Palace, black jeans to his meeting with President Jacques Chirac in Paris's Elysee Palace, a leather jacket to his talk with President Hu Jintao in Beijing's Great Hall of the People.
[snip]
Morales is everything Bolivia's former presidents were not. The 46-year-old Aymara Indian herded llamas as a boy and never finished high school. In the early 1990s he became the charismatic leader of coca growers in the Chapare region, an alliance that put him at odds with Bolivian and U.S. governments that sought to eradicate their crops. By 1995, Morales had founded his political party, Movement Toward Socialism.
Actually, I think it's probably a calculated political move, and a good one at that. The article says that the clothes were a distraction from his message, which was actually a softening of his hard-line anti-globalization campaign. But it makes perfect sense to me: he knew he had to moderate his message once he actually became president (happens to everyone, Bush the lone exception) and he knew this would not play well with his base, especially the part about making international energy companies "partners" with the state. This story about his clothes is now just a distraction from that. Brilliant.