CNN Journalist Runs As Communist; Invokes Obama's Name

Ha! I've heard people jokingly refer to CNN as the "Communist News Network." Now, given a small headline I saw yesterday, maybe it's not a joke! A former CNN en español journalist, Mauricio Funes, is a frontrunner in El Salvador's upcoming elections.

FoxNews reports (emphasis added):

He has taken a page out of Barack Obama’s playbook and tried to draw a comparison between himself and the American president. One of his campaign ads, despite the U.S. Embassy’s protests, features images of Obama and points out that both he and Obama were attacked by conservative parties who accused them of being associated with terrorists and radicals.

But for Mauricio Funes, a former journalist for CNN en Espanol, ties to radical leftists are no mere accusation. It’s a fact: He is the candidate of Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a former guerrilla group and by-product of El Salvador’s Communist movement that waged years of armed struggle before gaining legal status as a political party following a bloody civil war.

This Sunday Funes will face off against Rodrigo Avila, the former deputy director of the national police and the candidate of the National Republican Alliance Party (Arena), which has been in power for two decades. And while Avila has been gaining steadily in the polls, it is Funes who is provoking both inspiration and suspicion throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Latin American watchers wonder just what lies ahead for El Salvador, an American ally, if Funes wins.

Like Obama, it seems that Funes' fellow countrymen find that his lack of experience is what makes him a good choice for his party, the FMLN -- the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, a former guerrilla group and by-product of El Salvador’s Communist movement that waged years of armed struggle before gaining legal status as a political party following a bloody civil war.

“He is not an ideologue,” says Larry Birns, Director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. “He is a person who doesn’t mouth traditional political lingo. He’s a kind of a Schwarzenegger type. He’s a celebrity, and people have good feelings towards him, and most of all he carries with him very few negatives.”

Funes’ telegenic celebrity is a 180-degree turnabout from FMLN’s former presidential candidates, who carried the extreme leftist views on which the party was originally created.

“The party had run a series of ideologues who were very committed to the FMLN ideology, but they were never able to get beyond a certain minority of the vote,” Birns told FOXNews.com. “So this time, very much like in Nicaragua with Daniel Ortega, the decision was made by the electorate to basically back someone who could win.”

But many political analysts in the United States have their doubts that Funes will really govern the country if he’s elected.

“This is one of the big issues,” says Ray Walser, Latin American policy expert at the Heritage Foundation. “Is Funes a new force, or is he simply a face man for the older, hard-line FMLN, who are really sort of still the guerrillas, who want to go back to Marxist, Leninist views of society, who want to take it to a Cuba-style, Chavez-style system of government?”

Funes' possible election coupled with his party rising to the top might cause political difficulties between El Salvador and the United States, which has supported the ARENA party for some 20 years. In the future, could there be a rift beween our two countries?

While Funes has said during the campaign that he wants El Salvador and the U.S. to remain close friends and “strategic partners,” some Americans are skeptical.

“The foreign policy platform would probably be, look, we’ve been too dependent on the United States, we need to distance ourselves, we need to align ourselves with other forces in the world,” Walser says.

There have also been persistent rumors for years that if an FMLN candidate wins the presidency, the U.S. government will retaliate by deporting many of the 1 million Salvadorans who currently reside in the U.S. Last year about $3.8 billion was sent back to El Salvador from Salvadorans living in the U.S. Fear of these lost funds might explain why the polls -- which last summer so heavily favored Funes – have narrowed considerably.

“This is the first time you would have a left president in El Salvador and that’s creating I think a certain amount of consternation,” Walser said.

I wonder how many more countries are going to fall madly in love with inexperienced candidates and passionately hawk promises, much like a teenage girl, eager for love, willingly believes every cheap line a suitor tells her. Will all these lame lovers invoked The Obamessiah's name in order to stir their listeners' passions even more?