The harsh Republican response to President Barack Obama's defense of a mosque near ground zero marks a dramatic shift in the party's posture toward Islam -- from a once active courtship of Muslim voters to a very public tolerance after Sept. 11 to an openly aired sense of mistrust.
Republican leaders have largely abandoned former President George W. Bush's post-Sept. 11 rhetorical embrace of American Muslims and his insistence--- always controversial inside the party -- that Islam is a religion of peace. This weekend, former Bush aides were among the very few Republicans siding with Obama, as many of the party's leaders have moved toward more vocal denunciations of Islam's role in violence abroad and suspicion of its place at home.
The shift plays to a hostility toward Islam among many Republican voters, and it fits with traditional Republican attacks on Democratic weakness on security policy.
"Bush went against the grain of his own constituency," said Allen Roth, a political aide to conservative billionaire Ron Lauder and, independently, a key organizer of the fight against the mosque. "This is part of an underlying set of security issues that could play a significant role in the elections this November."
Obama's remarks provide a clear, national focus for the simmering question of Islam in American life, and Republicans showed every sign Saturday of beginning to capitalize on it, with Republican candidates in New York and Florida seeking to inject the issue into local races as Democrats largely held their silence.
That stance in the GOP--- both in terms of political strategy and policy views -- appears to be carrying the day. Most of the potential Republican presidential hopefuls, led by Sarah Palin, came out sharply against the mosque.
And while most of its opponents note that they aren't opposing Islam, just this project, Republican attempts to build bridges with Muslims are few and far between -- although some say that's because early post-Sept. 11 efforts were met with deep resistance. Republicans have stopped winning the Muslim votes they once split with Democrats, and largely stopped seeking them.
The spectrum ranges from silence on the issue to politicians and groups, like Keep America Safe, led by Liz Cheney and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, gearing up to engage the battle over the mosque and the basket of other issues involving the Obama administration's relationship with Muslims at home and abroad.
"The president supports a mosque at ground zero led by a man who blamed America for 9/11, his top intelligence official preaches the true meaning of jihad, and his attorney general can't even say the words 'radical Islam,'" said Michael Goldfarb, an adviser to Keep America Safe. "You start to worry they don't understand who the enemy is, and so Republicans might understandably feel like they have to spell it out for them."
Obama, meanwhile, only fed Republicans' eagerness to engage the issue with remarks Saturday morning that appeared to narrow his broader embrace of Islam in America to a defense of the legal right to build a mosque, though his office later issued a third statement saying he hadn't backed off his original remarks.
Muslim leaders say, regretfully, that they also see a dramatic change.
Republicans have "shifted completely away from the Bush administration line on relations with Islam and they've obviously made the political calculation that bashing Islam and Muslims is a winning issue for them," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who blamed the "tea party movement [for] liberating the inner bigot in people."
The shift has various causes. One is simply the freedom of opposition. "The stronger imperative for Bush's stance was geopolitical," said former Bush speechwriter David Frum, referring to the Bush administration's reliance on Islamic allies for the prosecution of conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now Republicans are liberated to say what many think, and what many of their supporters want to hear.
But the attacks on what is now nationally known as the "Ground Zero mosque" -- it is a few blocks north of the site -- also stand in for a broader turn in the cultural politics of the right, in which some of the social issues that served as the emotional core of candidates' appeals have lost their power. A recent CNN poll showing that 68 percent of Americans oppose the construction of the mosque also found that about half think there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. No political genius is required to decide which issue to run on.
The debate over the mosque's locale had been brewing in the crucible of the New York tabloids for parts of the spring, then died down. Then came an attempted car bombing in New York's Times Square, by a confessed suspect who'd said he planned mass deaths as vengeance for Muslims in the two wars being waged by the United States in the Mideast, which recalled for many residents the constant sense of edginess and fear the Sept. 11 attacks inspired.
New York's beleaguered Republicans, seeing an opening, have seized and driven the mosque issue, and Roth and other mainstream figures have worked to insulate it from more radical anti-Islamic voices, like blogger Pamela Geller, who might marginalize the cause.
Leading New York Republicans acknowledge a shift from the Bush years, but say Muslim leaders, not Republicans, are to blame.
"George Bush made every attempt to reach out," said Rep. Pete King, a leading critic of the mosque project. "The Muslim community did not reciprocate, did not respond. After Sept. 11, some of them became entrenched and really didn't know how to cope.
"Somehow the leadership in the community does not impel them forward to be more part of the community. That's my reading of it," said King, who also noted that sensitivities involving the site are far deeper, and more real, than many are willing to recognize beyond the boundaries of New York.
Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles Burlingame was the pilot of the jetliner that crashed into the Pentagon and who serves on the board of Keep America Safe, agreed that there is an emotional component but rejected the notion that the mosque issue is a "feelings" concept instead of part of a larger debate about different cultures and how the U.S. should engage with Muslim culture within the country.
"I do ascribe to the 'clash of civilizations' theory now," said Burlingame, who has been among the main voices questioning the funding behind the proposed mosque, and the intents of Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind it. She said, as she did after Obama's speech, that many Muslims have practiced peacefully in the U.S. before and after the attacks, but that Rauf has made statements supporting radical elements of Islam, and that the location was chosen to be provocative.
She criticized those, mostly led by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who are defending the project under freedom of religion, saying, "That's a Western concept."
"This is a different model," she said, arguing that in the United States-people "for generations had been raised on this concept of separation of church and state, and that you don't trash someone because of their religion ... but that's not what we're dealing with here."
"I think the challenge for us is enlisting the Muslims who have already bought into the American program and not adjusting" to Muslim culture, she added. For Burlingame, the issue is not political -- she said she objects to the content as well as the form of efforts by Bloomberg and others to push back because the goal is "to shut you up."
"We're talking to the wrong people," said New York City firefighter Tim Brown, a survivor of the attacks who has worked with Burlingame. He suggested that "radical" Muslims are being recognized in the United States-as part of the religious dialogue, as in the case of the mosque. "Whoever made this decision and whoever set us on this path, and I don't care if it's the Bush administration or whoever, it's the wrong path."
Whatever the cause of the shift, the end of the Bush-era outreach aligns with the views of much of the Republican base. A Pew poll found last year that 55 percent of conservative Republicans believe Islam encourages violence.
The pre-Sept. 11 Republican Party actively courted Muslim voters in key states like Michigan. An energetic effort to lead the socially conservative, relatively affluent community into the GOP was led by power broker Grover Norquist -- who didn't respond to a request to talk about Republicans and Muslims. But it failed, and the present-day Republican Party has more or less given them up for those lost and alienated by American policies in the Middle East and -- as Republicans see it -- misled by their own leaders into ambiguous public positions.
"The leading members of that community have not settled inside the Republican Party, and so their voice is lesser," said Frum.
Bush is hardly remembered fondly by Muslim Americans, many of whom blame him for a wave of detentions and deportations immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks and for conflict with Muslims abroad. But a less-remembered element of his legacy is the battle he fought within the Republican Party on Islam's behalf.
By the day after the attacks, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer recalled, Bush had expressed his intense concern at the possibility of a backlash against American Muslims, and his aides had begun discussing "the need to balance getting America ready for war against the people who carried out the attacks without infringing on Muslims' right to practice their religion."
On September 17, 2001, Bush visited Washington's Islamic Center with a simple message: "Islam is peace."
Those words didn't sit well with key segments of the Republican base, including some Christian leaders. In June 2002, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention suggested that the God of Muslims would "turn you into a terrorist that'll try to bomb people and take the lives of thousands and thousands of people."
Fleischer took public exception to the statement on Bush's behalf.
"It's something that the president definitely disagrees with. Islam is a religion of peace, that's what the president believes," he said.
Today, Fleischer says he thinks the mosque's organizers would be more sensible to go elsewhere, but that the GOP risks taking too hard a line on Islam as the 2012 elections approach.
"The real issue is going to be the rhetoric of presidential candidates in '11 and '12, and whether they try to strike a balance or whether is it much more vitriolic," he said. "We are at war with radical Islam; we are not at war with Muslims writ large, and we have to find that right balance."
Other former Bush aides backed President Obama's defense of the mosque. Former Bush consultant Mark McKinnon called Obama's Friday remarks an example of "bold and decisive leadership."
"An enormously complex and emotional issue -- but ultimately the right thing to do. A president is president for every citizen, including every Muslim citizen," said former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson. "Obama is correct that the way to marginalize radicalism is to respect the best traditions of Islam and protect the religious liberty of Muslim Americans. It is radicals who imagine an American war on Islam. But our conflict is with the radicals alone."
Among the first conservative groups gunning for the ground zero mosque was the National Republican Trust PAC, whose television ad two broadcast networks refused to air on the grounds that it seemed to tie the organizers of the community center, without evidence, to the planners of the terror attacks.
But it became a hit on YouTube, and combined with the complaints of New York politicians and some conservative bloggers, the project became a national issue.
"Once we brought this issue to the American people, the politicians were falling all over each other to get out in front of it," said Scott Wheeler, the group's executive director.
The GOP's likely presidential candidates drew a spectrum of shades of opposition but not a single one sided with Bloomberg in backing the mosque on the grounds of private property and religious freedom.
"Ground zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts," wrote Palin on July 18, calling on "peaceful Muslims" to "refudiate" it.
"There should be no mosque near ground zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia," wrote former House Speaker Newt Gingrich a day later.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, though he represents a relatively heavily Muslim state, rebuffed pleas from local Muslim leaders to back off his suggestion that the mosque would "degrade and disrespect" the Trade Center site. A spokesman for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney cited both "the wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda" in opposing it.
But it was former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee who seemed to fit the issue most clearly into a recognizable political category of culture war.
"Is it just that we can offend Americans and Christians, but not foreigners and Muslims?" he asked.
