Sean Penn wary of Wyclef Jean's bid to be Haiti's president

New York - Wyclef Jean is running for the Presidency of Haiti, a country recently ravaged by a major earthquake. But some question whether a famous singer is the right person to do the job.

Actor Sean Penn says he is suspicious of Wyclef Jean's decision to run for president of Haiti. In an interview on CNN last night reported by USAToday

"This is somebody who's going to receive an enormous amount of support from the United States, and I have to say I'm very suspicious of it, simply because he, as an ambassador at large, has been virtually silent. For those of us in Haiti, he has been a non-presence."

Penn, on the other hand, has been in Haiti since the deadly earthquake, running a 55,000-person tent camp through an organization he founded, J/P Haitian Relief. Penn worries about allegations that Wyclef took for himself $400,000 donated for the country through his Yele Haiti foundation. Penn told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that he doesn't really know Wyclef, since he hasn't seen or heard anything about him in the last six months. And The Guardian.co.UK questions whether Wyclef Jean wants to be the President of Haiti, or is just a singer with stars in his eyes. It points out that recently, Wyclef Jean was busy in his recording studio in a New Jersey basement, putting down tracks for his latest album, called, The Haitian Experience. He sings,

"Whyclef, the Haitian president!"

But questions are still being raised about why he's running. Jean doesn't answer that question very directly. He says he remembers a visit he made to Haiti before Christmas with his four-year-old daughter Angelina. He says he was just trying to spread a little joy for the children of Cite Soleil, the famously poor and violent slum that sits in the capital of Port-au-Prince.

"I wanted to bring Santa Claus to the slums because these kids were poor but I didn't feel like they shouldn't have a Christmas, so I brought a carnival into the slum and I took a helicopter and I landed with my daughter and a Santa Claus right in the middle of Cité Soleil."

While he was there, he stayed in his regular digs, the Hotel Montana, which three weeks later was reduced to rubble in the huge Haitian earthquake.

"We escaped death by a few weeks. So that's why I'm standing [for president]. Maybe I could have waited another 10 years for this, but this is urgent. Singing about policy is not enough. I've seen musicians sing about it all their life. I've taken the position to not only exercise what we are singing about, but to see if we could take five years to move this country into a better direction."

Wyclef's candidacy is bound to be explosive for the election on November 28th. The race is wide open, with no frontrunner. The man who is president currently, cannot run, having already served two five-year terms. Wyclef Jean is considered Haiti's most famous son. He was born there, but left when he was nine, settling first in Brooklyn and then out to northern New Jersey. He formed the singing group Fugees with his cousin, Pras Michel and Lauryn Hill and fame came fast. Their second album, The Score, sold more than 18 million copies worldwide and won two Grammys. Everyone agrees that Jean will have an electric presence during the campaign. But some question whether anyone in Haiti should vote for a pop star as president at such a dire moment in its history?

"People can say, 'Clef what do you know about politics and running the country, it sounds pretty insane Clef.' But when you think of the connections and allies I've assembled around the world, I feel I can help move this country forward."

Jean says he was never the kind of rapper who went around singing

"'Shake my booty, pop the champagne, let's go,' I would say we definitely don't want a pop star like that running the country."

Talking about himself in the third person,

"This pop star was not necessarily trying to be famous. His first album was called Blunt on Reality. It talked about human rights, social issues."

Wyclef Jean says he's always been a man of the people.

"In my world and the stereotypes we usually have, us hip-hop artists are going to go to jail. Here you have an artist who says: my idea is not to go to prison, my idea is to run my country as president. He decides he's at a point to transform music into policy."

Since 2005, Wyclef Jean says he has been actively involved in Haitian affairs, That's when he set up his charity Yéle Haiti to teach poor young people to read and write and award them educational scholarships. And he says he hasn't been doing nothing since the quake hit. He claims he reached Port-au-Prince the day after the quake and was instantly sucked in.

"I would say for two days I went missing. Two days underground, picking bodies up, taking them to a morgue, finding my friend [the rapper] Jimmy O dead in his car with a building toppled on him. I had his daughter in my arms. Then on the other side of town, my man gets shot. He'd been working for Yéle Haiti. At that point I lost it. Two days, just like being in the apocalypse."

He says the experience made him question his faith, even as the son of a Nazarene preacher. So what would he do for Haiti if he was elected President?

"There's nowhere to go but up in Haiti right now, because everywhere you look there's disaster. So the first thing you do is engage education and job creation."

One of the hurdles he will be faced with in his run is the controversy that has raged over his handling of the money for his charity. The Washington Post and the website Smoking Gun have written that his charity, Yele Haiti, which has raised about $9 million in disaster relief since January, is being accused of everything from late tax filing to directing funds directly towards Wyclef Jean. So does he really think he can win the Presidency?

"Even if I lose, I do win. The world will have known that in history there was a young man from Haiti who felt he wanted to do more than music, to engage in Haitian politics and help move the country forward. So in that sense I feel that even if I am to lose, I am to win."