With President Vázquez, the doctor is in the house and has cured many of the former ills that kept Uruguay down under the Blanco-Colorado duopoly on power (five decades of stagnation, hyperdependence on agriculture, high unemployment and underemployment, mass emigration to Argentina, etc.).
Frankly, I sometimes wish Argentina had had him as president instead of Mrs. Kirchner (who, as you know, is about to leave office in December). I have nothing but respect for her, and I have supported most of her initiatives: the Universal Childhood Entitlement; student assistance programs; saving Argentina's Social Security and Medicare from private profiteers; reviving mortgage lending and consumer credit; reviving education, arts, and sciences (Argentina is once again a regional leader in these areas after 40 years of decline); recovering the oil, gas, airline, and railway companies from foreign (and domestic) vampires; social reforms such as marriage equality, ending the use of libel/slander laws to restrict freedom of speech, and limits on media monopolies; and of course her late husband's many reforms.
Nevertheless, she's a dark-skinned, fairly strong-willed woman in a country where the ruling class and much of the upper-middle class have long been accustomed to thinking of women like her as nannies and maids. Accordingly, to many of them her presidency has felt like "8 long years of having my maid bark orders at me." That, more than anything else (even more than Cristina Kirchner's own mistakes, and there have been some), has made her job of governing a real uphill battle most of the time.
Somebody like Dr. Vázquez - even under otherwise identical circumstances - would have at the very least been respected by these people, and may have actually accomplished more as a result. The many differences notwithstanding, I suppose it's a problem President Obama can relate to.
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