Arab-Americans take second look at Bush support

DEARBORN, Mich. — In 2000, President Bush won over the Arab-American community here by criticizing the Clinton administration for using ethnic profiling at airports, but September 11 means things will not go so smoothly for the president with Arab-Americans in 2004.

Back then, Mr. Bush had a one-hour private meeting with 26 community leaders at a Hyatt hotel and handed out a two-page statement in English and Arabic, castigating the White House for its treatment of Arabs.

“Under the Clinton-Gore administration, Arab-American air travelers have experienced harassment and delay simply because of their ethnic heritage,” Mr. Bush said in his statement. “Such indiscriminate uses of passenger profiling are wrong and must be stopped.”

“Bush got some excitement stirred up when he did that,” said James Zogby, head of the D.C.-based Arab American Institute. “But now there is a resentment of the fact that we have seen no follow-through. The Justice Department has pursued policies that have not been favorable.”

It is almost a certainty that things will be different this year, as Democrats seek to exploit post-September 11 security measures that they say have marginalized the nation’s 3.5 million persons of Arab descent.

In Dearborn, the heart of the country’s ethnic Arab population, Democrats already are lining up phone banks and other recruitment efforts to get out the vote among Michigan’s 500,000 Arab-Americans for the Feb. 7 Democratic caucus.

“I will vote for Bush again, but I think many others have some reservations,” said Tim Attalla, a first-generation Palestinian American and a well-known Republican activist and lawyer here.

“Already, I have gotten calls from the Democratic Party here, asking me if I am ready to join them,” said Mr. Attalla, adding that he is not tempted to switch his vote, but isn’t convinced that others won’t.

“To take that vote from the president is very significant,” he said. “It is symbolic.”

The stakes are high. For the president to win a majority of the nation’s 1.2 million Arab-American voters will be something to tout even internationally, because many see the administration and America in general as anti-Arab.

“People overseas will look at that and see that [Arab-Americans] are being treated well by whoever gets that vote,” Mr. Zogby said. “It will help the Arab world understand America through our experience here.”

Mr. Bush benefited in 2000 from the candidacy of Ralph Nader, whose Lebanese heritage helped earn him around 13 percent of the vote, according to a poll by Zogby International, a firm run by Mr. Zogby’s brother, John Zogby. Mr. Bush, the survey found, carried the ethnic Arab vote by 45.5 percent to 38 percent over Democratic candidate Al Gore.

The president still carries considerable heft among the Republican faithful in the Arab community. His most productive fund-raiser in the state is a Lebanese immigrant, Yousif B. Ghafari, who heads an engineering firm in Dearborn.

Still, the John Ashcroft-led Justice Department is widely disliked among Arab-Americans, and statements from other Republicans, such as House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s remark that a Palestinian state would be “a terrorist state,” have been taken personally by many Muslims in the Arab community.

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