From the time the smoke cleared from the 1910 Mexican Revolution until the 20th century ended, our neighbor nation was run by warlords and their successors who formed a "revolutionary party." The firm hands of Sonorans álvaro Obregón, Plutarco Elías Calles and Abelardo Rodríguez formed a bureaucracy that could, they insisted, do no wrong, because everything it did was in the name of — hand to heart, bugles in the background — la revolución.

With Miguel Alemán in the wake of World War II, generals gave way to well-educated briefcase-carriers, and the party thrived in its new institutionalized-revolutionary form: PRI's logo, in the national colors of red, green and white, became an eye-numbing part of the landscape from Chiapas to Chihuahua.

Organized labor, organized farmworkers and public-employee organizations became its strongest constituents, and the ruling party became a combination of Lady Bountiful and Big Daddy: Play the game and reap the benefits; cross a priísta and pay the penalty. Hmm — reminds us of a party somewhere closer to home ...

For many of its decades in power, Mexico progressed under PRI — but as early as the 1960s, cracks could be seen in the monolith. Succeeding presidents sought to outdo their predecessors in foreign-banked fortunes; the fast-growing Mexican middle class, along with nationalized oil and other industries, paid an equally fast-growing number of thieves.

At last, the long-scorned token-opposition PAN, the National Action Party, began winning mayoralties and governorships in the nation's north, in spite of ballot-box irregularities. Hmm ...

Then in 2000, the formidably personable Vicente Fox captured the presidency under the PAN banner. He and his 2006 successor, another panista named Felipe Calderón, still had to cope with congressional foot-dragging by PRI and the further-left Democratic Revolutionary Party, PRD, as they tried to clean up the government. As for the economy, they promoted free-market principles. Hmm — like their Republican counterparts north of the border?

A crashing economy caught up with PAN; so did its ineffectiveness in stopping an increasingly violent drug trade that PRI had at least managed to channel to the benefit of one executive or another. Oil, for many reasons including infrastructural neglect, became less of a golden-egg-laying goose. As for money sent south by Mexicans working in gringolandia, this country's financial woes mean fewer jobs — and fewer remittances from the land long seen as Mexico's socio-economic safety valve.

As for the country's touristic wealth, it's been wasted away by violence and real or imagined worries about swine flu.

Last weekend, Mexicans went to the polls for midterm congressional elections, and to choose governors in half a dozen of the 31 states. It proved to be a comeback for the party of the revolution: PRI gained a congressional plurality and won a handful of governorships — partly at the expense of the PRD, but also in a signal of national weariness with PAN.

This will strengthen PRI for the 2012 presidential campaign, positioning the party as the front-runner for the 2012 presidential election.

That might be disheartening to those recalling the party's most recent years in power, but PRI, its often-brutal authoritarianism included, wasn't all bad: It trained generations of skilled administrators, and groomed plenty of politicians loaded with personalismo. Even the party's bread-and-circuses behavior came with the occasional populist reform — which might explain why, exiled from the presidency, it still controls most statehouses and local governments.

This year's slogan, "PRI, proven experience, new attitude," at least hinted that an abusive party realized the error of its ways. Correction might come harder, but if it applies its revolutionary ideals, it could co-opt the country's divided leftists and return to the days before corruption caught up with it.