Luckily, perhaps, for Daniel Ortega, U.S. President George W. Bush has major political distractions at home and elsewhere in the world - not least of which being the result of this week's mid-term elections.

In the aftermath of the vote, his Republican Party having lost both houses of Congress, Mr. Bush's domestic and international policies are in disarray and he will struggle to escape the status of a lame-duck resident of the White House. So, we expect the U.S. President, his new Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, and his foreign minister, Condoleezza Rice, to spend much of the rest of time of Mr. Bush's presidency salvaging as much as they can in Iraq, a project which has come to define this U.S. administration.

Additionally, Mr. Bush's nominee as America's ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, is likely to be in for another rough ride at the nomination hearings in a Democratic-controlled Congress, without the immediate prospect of him slipping through some procedural loophole as happened in the first attempt to allow him temporary appointment. In this regard, a political hawk, critical to the formulation and execution of the Bush foreign policy, might be muted, if not entirely tamed.

Against this backdrop, Ortega has some breathing space. There is time to prove, in this stint as Nicaragua's leader, that even if he is not the absolute darling of the free market, he is not the idealist and romantic left-wing radical, who led the Sandinistas to power in 1979 after their overthrow of the Samoza dictatorship. In his first tenure, which simmered on the fringes of the Cold War, Ortega presided over a country that was mired in a civil war; the Cuban/Soviet-backed Sandinistas on one side and the American proxies on the other. In the process, Ortega's grand revolutionary vision darkened into political and economic failure. It was hardly surprising that in the first free and open post-revolutionary vote Ortega was beaten by Mrs. Violeta Chamorro, a stand-in candidate, whose main asset was that she had inherited, as widowed wife, the name of a famous newspaper publishing family that had resisted the Samozas and the Sandinistas.

After a third try, Ortega, at 60, is back, presenting himself as a leader with the capacity and willingness to accommodate the free market. He has pledged to follow through on Nicaragua's membership in the Central American Free Trade Area (CAFTA) and in economic relations with the United States. In line with his antecedents, there will be social programmes for the poor, but without socialist expropriations and not in conflict with economic orthodoxies.

Time well tell how well Ortega balances his objectives and whether his current declarations are mere words. So far, Nicaraguan capital seems willing to take him at his word. In all likelihood, too, he will also be offered a bit of a cushion in Venezuela's Hugo Chavez's PetroCaribe energy initiative.

These, and the Bush distractions, could prove important if Ortega has really re-made himself.

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