Calderon's first move on taking power 18 months ago was to launch a bold $7 billion army-led assault on powerful drug cartels, vowing to wrest back control of violence-scarred northern border states.
His army busts have put a string of senior smugglers behind bars and captured truckloads of cocaine and cash.
But the top drug lords are still free, and disrupting years-old trafficking alliances and protection networks has sparked an explosion in killings between rival gangs who dump hacked-off heads and tortured bodies in public.
The bloodshed has dented Calderon's popularity and left him bogged down in a vicious war with the odds of winning it stacked against him.
Calderon, 45, has defined success as reducing the violence, but drug murders have instead soared to more than 4,000 since his offensive began, and the turf wars intensified this year.
Perhaps one technically engages in analysis when suggesting that the odds of winning are stacked against Calderon, but we don't really need some credentialed academic to tell us that, do we? Has anyone ever won a drug war?