No one, I wrote in my diary, believes that Chávez will last his full term. They see him as a damaging buffoon, rather than as a dangerous revolutionary.

And, while Russian leaders may start out as reformers, they do not often remain so. Boris Yeltsin began the 1990 s as a courageous democrat, only to end up a corrupt, bibulous buffoon, while Putin initially vowed to bring law and order to the post Yeltsin chaos.

Its incomparable vitality and language, for example, find their way into the work of the Soviet writer Andrei Platonov. A communist who considered himself an honest proletarian writer, but called by Stalin, the Red Clown of Power, svoloc (scoundrel) and balagancik (buffoon), Platonov lived a lifelong ordeal.

Those who wrote off Donald Trump as a buffoon failed to see that he has shrewdly read the Republican zeitgeist, and that he knows precisely where to stick the knife into competitors. His depiction of former Florida governor Jeb Bush as a man of low energy has done real damage to a candidate whom many had assumed even before he formally entered the race would be the favorite.