Which U.S. Presidential Candidates Should Muslim Americans Support?

By Richard H. Curtiss

The U.S. presidential election won’t be held until November 2000. But if America’s six to eight million Muslims are to make a political impact in accordance with their numbers, and thus put themselves on the national political map for the first time, they should be making their presidential choices right now.

The reason is that, in competition for national influence, many states have moved forward the dates of their primary elections, in which the voters choose delegates to the national conventions of both parties. The delegates, most of whom go to the summer conventions pledged to a particular candidate, then cast pro-forma votes reflecting the choices of voters in their states.

Therefore, by the end of the day on March 6, 2000, the date of the primary election in several states including California, which has the largest population of any state, the presidential candidates of both parties probably will have been selected. Earlier polls in such diverse but small states as Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina will have given voters indications of how popular sentiment is running. But it will be the actual delegate totals candidates rack up in such major states as California, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Texas that will earn the nomination for one candidate from each of the two major parties.

Happily, most of America’s six to eight million Muslims live in those same key states. Candidates from both parties disregard this because the political stereotype is that Muslims don’t vote. Leaders of all national Muslim political organizations hope to shatter this stereotype in the upcoming primary elections. And some of those Muslim leaders are determined to go on to influence significantly, perhaps decisively, the results of the general election as well by combining to recommend a single candidate for a Muslim bloc vote in November.

This is no pipe dream. In a close race probably neither candidate can win without California’s electoral votes. And if the Muslims really do vote as a bloc, their candidate probably will win in California. There are other big ifs. There are wreckers from extremely conservative Muslim circles who say Muslim Americans shouldn’t participate at all in a non-Islamic society. Their numbers are tiny, but they seem well enough funded, presumably from abroad, to travel from convention to convention of U.S. Muslim organizations trying to break up any political discussions.

More menacing to the idea of a bloc vote are Muslims with professional affiliations with one party or another. Their political advice is valuable in terms of which candidate from their own party is most deserving of Muslim votes—up until March 6. After that, however, leaders of national Muslim organizations hope to sweep aside the partisans and unite Muslim voters from both parties behind a single candidate.

Such a bloc vote could neutralize the Israel lobby’s control of U.S. Middle East policymaking. Diplomats have long dreamed of basing U.S. foreign policy upon real American interests (which include regional stability, human rights, self-determination and fair play) and no longer upon the competing demands of domestic ethnic lobbies. A clear result of such lobby-driven foreign policy-making is the persistent U.S. tilt toward Israel.

But U.S. Muslims, hopefully supported by up to two million Christian Arab Americans as well, may be able to neutralize the Israel lobby in the year 2000. To do this, Muslim Americans are examining the statements and records of all of the presidential candidates for the primary elections.

The Democratic candidates are easily dealt with. Both incumbent Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley are serious candidates. By contrast, the campaign of the most recently announced Democratic candidate, Warren Beatty, who plays the role of a presidential candidate in the Hollywood film “Bulworth,” seems more like an attempt to garner publicity for the film or to revive a flagging movie career.

Bradley is doing his share of pandering for the Jewish vote, but there is no way he can “out-Israel” Gore, an Israel lobby acolyte throughout his political career. Gore’s personal friends, political mentors, and financial backers are life-long supporters of Israel. Even during the incumbency of Likud Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Gore had this to say at the April 1999 national convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): “America stands by Israel forever. Our special relationship with Israel is unshakable; it is iron-clad, eternal and absolute. It does not depend on the peace process; it transcends the peace process.”

Gore’s Arab-American supporters (yes, incredibly, there are some) will point out that this year some Jewish leaders are abandoning Gore. This is true, but it is over his electability, not his policies.

One such leader is World Jewish Congress president Edgar Bronfman. He made known recently that he had signed on to a fund-raiser for Republican candidate George W. Bush. He also donated this year to Bradley. Explained New York Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf to the New York Jewish weekly Forward: “Some smart Jews play both sides. This ensures that Jewish interests are protected. At least, the competition within the Jewish world to get close [to Bush] has begun.”

For Muslim Americans who cast their votes in Democratic primaries, therefore, the choice should be easy. It won’t be Gore.

Of the eight Republican presidential candidates still in the race, only five can possibly win the nomination. Fortunately, two of those have done the least pandering to Israel. They are Texas Gov. George W. Bush and former cabinet member and Red Cross president Elizabeth Dole. At this point they would seem to be the most eligible candidates for Muslims voting in Republican primaries.

The other three viable Republicans are Arizona Sen. John McCain, who probably will get the nomination if front-runner Bush stumbles, Gary Bauer, a one-issue (anti-abortion) but extremely articulate candidate, and magazine heir Steve Forbes, who has enough money to blanket television with his advertisements. Unfortunately, although Bauer’s family values and anti-abortion message will appeal to Muslims as much as to his fellow Catholics, all three of these candidates seem committed to the Israel lobby.

Further marginalized, with no chance of winning either their party’s presidential nomination or a national election, are former Vice President Dan Quayle, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, and media political commentator Pat Buchanan. Quayle is as bad on the Palestine issue as Gore, and adds to it a call for strengthening U.S. ties with India. Commenting on Quayle’s sinking political prospects, former AIPAC official Douglas Bloomfield, a political columnist for the Washington Jewish Week, noted wistfully that as the elder Bush’s vice president, Quayle “was known as one of the friendly [to Israel] forces in the largely unfriendly Bush administration.”

As a newcomer to the race, Hatch’s position on Middle East issues is not clear to this writer. Hatch may hope that his Washington experience will make him an attractive vice presidential nominee on a ticket with Bush, who has not served in Congress.

Initially it appeared that the issue of moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem might be a way of separating the panderers to the Israel lobby from the other candidates. By now, however, Bradley and all of the Republican candidates but Buchanan have come out for the embassy move, with George W. Bush (or “W,” as journalists have started calling him) and Dole the very last to do so.

In both of their cases the concessions were reluctant. Bush must be well aware of the Israel lobby’s major role in engineering his father’s 1992 loss to Clinton. Elizabeth Dole must be aware of the major mistake made by her husband, Sen. Robert Dole, who after years of resisting the Israel lobby in the Senate, pandered to it at the beginning of his 1996 presidential campaign. The result was that he lost the potential support of millions of Muslim-American voters in key electoral states, and picked up virtually no Jewish support at all.

Gore’s Special Ambiguity

Gore’s position on the embassy move is a special case, since as a member of the incumbent Clinton administration Gore can hardly come out against its responsible policy of waiting until Jerusalem’s status is settled in final negotiations. Given his career-long devotion to Israel, he can get away with his present ambiguity.

Another special case is Pat Buchanan. As the only outspoken critic of Israel among the candidates, he has long appealed to Arab-American voters. On the other hand, his nativist stand on immigration issues will not appeal to either Muslim-American or Christian Arab-American immigrants and his far, far right stance on most issues alienates more voters than it attracts, ruining his chances of winning either the Republican nomination or the general election.

Buchanan’s significance now is that he may leave the Republican Party to run as the Reform Party candidate, and take just enough Republican voters with him to help the Democratic candidate to win, as did Reform Party candidate Ross Perot in 1992.

If, instead, the Reform Party nominates Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who has made no significant statements on the Middle East, Ventura likely will draw at least as many voters away from the Democrats as the Republicans, but not enough to win the general election.

The newly formed Islamic Institute, made up of Muslim activists with ties to the Republican Party, already has endorsed Bush, who seems unstoppable. On the assumption that “W” will win the Republican nomination, Democratic journalists, and Israel’s supporters among them, are seeking both to find some dark secret from his past and to portray him as a lightweight, particularly on foreign policy.

If Bush should stumble, the Republican nomination probably will go to Vietnam prisoner of war McCain, who is so well positioned as a middle-of-the-road figure that he probably would go on to win the national election. Although his record on Israel is bad, his willingness to take on difficult issues such as political campaign finance reform, in opposition to the leaders in his own party, offers some hope that he might be nudged, on patriotic grounds, toward a more evenhanded Middle Eastern stance. It’s something on which Arizona friends of the Palestinians should be working.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.