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Full article here.Hip-hop, more than most pop genres, is something of a pulpit, urban fire and brimstone garbed in baggy pants and backward caps. So it's little wonder that one of the music form's icons, Haitian-American superstar [COLOR=#366388 ! important][COLOR=#366388 ! important]Wyclef [COLOR=#366388 ! important]Jean[/COLOR][/COLOR], is the son of a Nazarene preacher - or that he likens himself, as a child of the Haitian diaspora, to a modern-day Moses, destined to return and lead his people out of bondage. Haiti's Jan. 12 earthquake, which ravaged the western hemisphere's poorest country and killed more than 200,000 people, was the biblical event that sealed his calling. After days of helping ferry mangled Haitian corpses to morgues, Jean felt as if he'd "finished the journey from my basket in the bulrushes to standing in front of the burning bush," he told me this week. "I knew I'd have to take the next step." [/COLOR]
That would be running for President of Haiti. Jean told Time he is going to announce his candidacy for the Nov. 28 election just days before the Aug. 7 deadline. One plan that was discussed, loaded with as much Mosaic symbolism as a news cycle can hold, called for him to declare his candidacy on Aug. 5 upon arriving in Port-au-Prince from New York, where he grew up after leaving Haiti with his family at age 9. "If not for the earthquake, I probably would have waited another 10 years before doing this," Jean says. "The quake drove home to me that Haiti can't wait another 10 years for us to bring it into the 21st century." Jean sees no contradiction between his life as an artist and his ambitions as a politician. "If I can't take five years out to serve my country as President," he argues, "then everything I've been singing about, like equal rights, doesn't mean anything." (Watch the video of Wyclef Jean discussing his plans to run for president of Haiti.)
It's tempting to dismiss this as flaky performance art, a publicity stunt from the same guy who just a few years ago recorded a number called "President" that included the refrain "If I was President." But Jean's chances as well as his motives seem solid. And there are good reasons for [COLOR=#366388 ! important][COLOR=#366388 ! important]Haitians[/COLOR] - and the U.S.-led international donor community, which is bankrolling Haiti's long slog to the 21st century - to take this particular hip-hop politician seriously. Pop-culture celebrity hardly disqualifies you from high office today. (The last time I looked, an action hero was still running California.) And in Haiti, where half the population of about 9 million is under age 25, it's an asset as golden as a rapper's chains. Amid Haiti's gray postquake rubble, Jean is far more popular with that young cohort than their chronically corrupt and inept mainstream politicians are, and he'll likely galvanize youth participation in the election. [/COLOR]
More important, Jean stands to prove that fame can do more than lift voter turnout - or raise millions of dollars for [COLOR=#366388 ! important][COLOR=#366388 ! important]earthquake [COLOR=#366388 ! important]victims[/COLOR][/COLOR], as his YÉle Haiti (Haiti Freedom Cry) foundation has this year. His presidential run, win or lose, could build a long-awaited bridge between Haiti and its diaspora: a legion of expatriates and their progeny, many of them successful in pursuits spanning every field, who number 800,000 in the U.S. alone. International aid managers agree that Haiti really can't recover from the quake unless it taps into the education, capital, entrepreneurial drive and love for mother country that Jean epitomizes - even if his French (one of Haiti's official languages) is poor and his Creole (the other) is rusty. "A lot of Haitians are excited about this," says Marvel Dandin, a popular Port-au-Prince radio broadcaster. "Given the awful situation in Haiti right now," he says, "most people don't care if the President speaks fluent Creole."
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