Well here's an endorsement President Obama almost certainly didn't want. Hugo Chavez likened his current election rival, Henrique Capriles, to Mitt Romney on Saturday, saying that Capriles isn't truly a friend to the poor. "I believe the person to best explain the loser's agenda isn't Barack Obama but rather Romney, because it's the extreme right-wing agenda that borders on the fascism of the United States," he said.
The remark seems to indicate that Chavez prefers Obama; indeed, in an earlier interview he said that Obama "deep down is a good guy, if you remove him from the context of being president of an empire," the AP reports. Obama has had a few seemingly kind words for Chavez, too; Romney has been criticizing Obama for a statement he made a few weeks ago in which he declared that his "overall sense is that what Mr. Chavez has done over the past several years has not had a serious national security impact on us," a view Romney called "simply naïve." (More Hugo Chavez stories.)