July 19, 2011
Islam-Baiting Doesn’t Work
It Failed in Campaign 2010 and Will Do Worse
in 2012
By Stephan Salisbury
During the 2010 midterm election campaign, virtually every hard-charging
candidate on the far right took a moment to trash a Muslim, a mosque, or
Islamic pieties. In the wake of those elections, with
85 new
Republican House members and a surging Tea Party movement, the
political virtues of anti-Muslim rhetoric as a means of rousing voters
and alarming the general electorate have gone largely unchallenged. It
has become an article of faith that a successful 2010 candidate on the
right should treat Islam with revulsion, drawing a line between America
the Beautiful and the destructive impurities of Islamic cultists and
radicals.
“Americans are learning what Europeans have known for years:
Islam-bashing wins votes,”
wrote journalist Michael Scott Moore in the wake of the 2010
election. His assumption was shared by many then and is still widely
accepted today.
But as the 2012 campaign ramps up along with the anti-Muslim rhetoric
machine, a look back at 2010 turns out to offer quite an unexpected story
about the American electorate. In fact, with rare exceptions,
“Islam-bashing” proved a strikingly poor campaign tactic. In state after
state, candidates who focused on illusory Muslim “threats,” tied ordinary
American Muslims to terrorists and radicals, or characterized mosques as
halls of triumph (and prayer in them as indoctrination) went down to
defeat.
Far from winning votes, it could be argued that “Muslim-bashing”
alienated large swaths of the electorate -- even as it hardened an
already hard core on the right.
The fact is that many of the loudest anti-Muslim candidates lost, and for
a number of those who won, victory came by the smallest of margins, often
driven by forces that went well beyond anti-Muslim rhetoric. A
careful look at 2010 election results indicates that Islamophobic talking
points can gain attention for a candidate, but the constituency that can
be swayed by them remains limited, although not insignificant.
A Closer Look
It’s worth taking a closer look. In 2010,
anti-Muslim rhetoric rode in with the emergence that July of a “mosque”
controversy in lower Manhattan. New York Republican gubernatorial
candidate Rick Lazio, facing indifference to his candidacy in the primary
race, took up what right-wing anti-Muslim bloggers had dubbed “the Mosque
at Ground Zero,” although the planned cultural center in question would
not have been a mosque and was not at Ground Zero. With a handy alternate
reality already sketched out for him, Lazio
demanded that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, then
state attorney general, “investigate” the mosque. He implied as
well that its leaders had ties to Hamas and that the building, when
built, would somehow represent a threat to the “personal security and
safety” of city residents.
A fog of acrid rhetoric subsequently enshrouded the campaign -- from
Lazio and his Tea Party-backed opponent, Carl Paladino, a Buffalo
businessman. Paladino beat the hapless Lazio in the primary and was then
handily dispatched by Cuomo in the general election. Cuomo had not joined
the Muslim bashing, but by the end of the race, dozens of major political
figures and potential Republican presidential candidates -- including
Newt
Gingrich, Tim
Pawlenty, Mitt
Romney, Michele
Bachmann, Rick
Santorum, Sarah
Palin, and Rick
Perry -- had denounced the loathsome Mosque at Ground Zero and
sometimes the whole of Islam. What began as a local issue had by then
become a national political litmus test and a wormhole to the country’s
darkest sentiments.
But the hard reality of election results demonstrated one
incontrovertible fact. Both Lazio and Paladino, heavily invested in
portraying Muslims as somehow different from everyone else, went down to
dismal defeats. Nor could these trouncings simply be passed off as what
happens in a relatively liberal northeastern state. Even in
supposed hotbeds of anti-Muslim sentiment, xenophobic rhetoric and fear
mongering repeatedly proved weak reeds for candidates.
Take Tennessee, a state in the throes of its own mosque-building
controversy (in Murfreesboro) at the height of the 2010 campaign.
There, gubernatorial candidate Ron Ramsey
couldn’t slam Islam often enough. Despite raising $2.7 million,
however, he went down to defeat in the Republican primary, attracting
only 22% of the vote. During the campaign, Republican victor Bill Haslam,
now governor, simply
stated that
decisions about mosques and religious construction projects should be
governed by local zoning ordinances and the Constitution.
In another 2010 Tennessee race, Lou Ann Zelenik, a Tennessee Republican
congressional candidate and Tea Party activist, denounced the
Murfreesboro mosque plans relentlessly. Zelenik ran her campaign like an
unreconstructed Indian fighter, with Muslims standing in as opponents in
a
frontier war. As she typically put the matter, “Until the
American Muslim community find it in their hearts to separate themselves
from their evil, radical counterparts, to condemn those who want to
destroy our civilization and will fight against them, we are not
obligated to open our society to any of them.”
It didn’t work. Zelenik, too, was defeated, attracting 30% of the vote in
a three-way primary race; the winner, state senator Diane Black, edged
her out with 31%. Black declined to denounce the Murfreesboro
mosque project and went on to win the general election.
Islamophobic Failures Around the Country
The impotency of anti-Muslim rhetoric was not
some isolated local phenomenon. Consider this: in the 2010 election
cycle, anti-Muslim Senate candidate
Sharron Angle was defeated in Nevada, and the
similarly inclined Jeff Greene lost his Senate bid in Florida.
A slew of congressional candidates who engaged in anti-Muslim rants or
crassly sought to exploit the Mosque at Ground Zero controversy also went
down, including Francis X.
Becker, Jr., in New York, Kevin
Calvey in
Oklahoma, Dan
Fanelli and
Ronald
McNeil in Florida, Ilario
Pantano in North Carolina, Spike
Maynard in West Virginia, and Dr. Marvin
Scott in Indiana.
Not all candidates bad-mouthing Muslims failed, of course. Renee
Ellmers, a nurse
running in North Carolina’s Second District, won her race by about 1,500
votes after airing an incendiary television spot that likened the lower
Manhattan cultural center to a “victory mosque” and conflated Islam with
terrorism. But Ellmers' main campaign talking point was the abomination
of health-care reform. That “victory mosque” was only a bauble-like
embellishment, a dazzling attention grabber.
Similarly, Republican Rick Scott, running for governor in Florida,
featured a
deceptive television ad that referred to the New York project as “Obama’s
mosque” and, like Ellmers’s ad, seamlessly fused Islam, terrorism, and
murder. Tea Party favorite Scott, however, had a slight advantage in
gaining a victory margin of about one percentage point over Democrat Alex
Sink: he poured a
staggering $73 million of his own money into the race in which he
largely painted Obama as an anti-business incompetent. Despite
lavishing more personal cash on the race than any candidate in Florida
history, Scott won by
less than 100,000 votes, falling short of 50% of the total. He
was only the second Florida governor to take office without the backing
of a majority of the electorate.
If some virulent political rhetoric was credited with bringing victory to
candidates at the time, its effect in retrospect looks more questionable
and less impressive. Take the victorious campaign of Republican
Allen West for Florida’s 22nd Congressional District. A Tea Party
favorite quick to exploit anti-Muslim fears, he was also a veteran of the
Iraq War and had been
fined by the Army for the beating and threatened killing of an Iraqi
prisoner.
During the campaign, he made numerous statements linking Islam with
terrorism and weighed in loudly on the proposed Manhattan Islamic center
more than 1,000 miles away. In an
open letter to his opponent, two-term incumbent Democrat Ron Klein,
he noted that “the mosque symbolizes a clear victory in the eyes of those
who brought down the twin towers.” Klein then caved and
joined West in opposing the cultural center, claiming that Ground
Zero should only be “a living memorial where all Americans can honor
those who were killed on September 11, 2001.”
In the election, West reversed the results of his 2008 race against Klein
and ever since, his victory has been seen as one of the
triumphs of anti-Muslim trash talking. A look at the numbers,
however, tells a slightly different story. For one thing, West, too, had
a significant financial advantage. He had already
raised
more than $4 million as the campaign began, more than four times his
total in 2008 and twice as much as Klein. Much of West’s funding came
from out-of-state donors and conservative PACs. For all that money,
however, West won the election by not “losing” as many votes as Klein did
(when compared to 2008). In 2010, West won with about 115,000 votes to
Klein’s 97,000; in 2008, when Klein had the funding advantage and a
presidential year electorate at his back, he beat West, 169,000 to
140,000.
Off-year elections normally mean lower turnouts, which clearly worked to
West’s advantage. His victory total amounted to about a third of the 2008
total vote. And there’s the point. The motivated, far-right base of the
Republican Party/Tea Party can, at best, pull in about a quarter to a
third of the larger electorate. In addition, West became the Definer: He
blocked out the issues, agitated his base, and got people to the polls.
Klein ceded the terms of the debate to him and failed to galvanize
support. Did anti-Muslim rhetoric help West? Probably. Can it work in a
presidential election year when substantial turnout ensures that the base
won’t rule? Unlikely.
Nevertheless, candidates on the right are already ramping up the rhetoric
for 2012. Herman Cain, the pizza king who would be president, is but one
obvious example. He says he may not know much, but one thing he knows for
sure: when he’s elected, no Muslims will find their way into his
administration.
As he put it in an
interview with Christianity Today, “Based upon the little
knowledge that I have of the Muslim religion, you know, they have an
objective to convert all infidels or kill them.” Cain
told the website Think Progress that he’d brook no Muslim cabinet
members or judges because “there is this creeping attempt, there’s this
attempt to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our
government. It does not belong in our government.”
Before a national television audience at a recent Republican presidential
debate, however, Cain proceeded to say that he really hadn’t said what he
had, in fact, said. This is called a “clarification.” What he meant, Cain
reassured television viewers, was that he would only bar disloyal
Muslims, the ones “trying to kill us.”
It almost seems as if candidates defeated in 2010 when using over-the-top
anti-Muslim rhetoric are expecting a different outcome in 2012. Lawyer
Lynne Torgerson in Minnesota is a fine example of this syndrome. In 2010,
she decided to take on Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of
Congress,
pounding him relentlessly for his supposed “ties” to “radical
Islamism.”
“And what do I know of Islam?” she
wrote on the “issues” page of her 2010 campaign website. “Well,
I know of 911.” Alas for Torgerson, the strategy didn’t work out so well.
She was crushed by Ellison, garnering only 3% of the vote. Now, Torgerson
is back, her message even more extreme. Ellison is no longer simply tied
to “radical Islamism,” whatever that may be; he has apparently
used his time in Congress to become a “radical Islamist”
pushing, she claims, nothing less than the adoption of “Islamic
Sharia law.”
Sharia is the New Mosque at Ground Zero
Sharia
has become 2012’s Mosque at Ground Zero, with about 20 states
considering laws that would ban its use and candidates shrilly denouncing
it -- a convenient way, presumably, to keep harping on nonexistent, yet
anxiety-producing, “threats.” Since no one knows what you’re talking
about when you decry Sharia, it’s even easier than usual to say anything,
no matter how bizarre or duplicitous.
So be prepared to hear a lot about “Sharia” between now and November
2012.
Going forward a few things seem clear. For one, the Islamophobic
machinery fueled by large rightwing foundations, PACs, individuals, and
business interests will continue to elaborate a virtual reality in which
Muslim and Islamic “threats” lurk around every American corner and behind
every door. It is important to realize that once you’ve entered this
political landscape, taking down anti-Muslim “facts” with reality is a
fool’s errand. This is a realm akin to a video game, where such
“facts” are dispatched only to rise again like so many zombies. In the
world of Resident Evil, truth hardly matters.
But bear in mind that, as the 2010 election results made clear, that
particular virtual reality is embraced by a distinct and limited American
minority. For at least 70% of the electorate, when it comes to
anti-Muslim slander, facts do matter. Failure to challenge the bogus
rhetoric only allows the loudest, most reckless political gamer to set
the agenda, as Ron Klein discovered to his dismay in Florida.
Attacks on the deadly threat of Sharia, the puffing up of Muslim plots
against America, and the smearing of candidates who decline to make
blanket denunciations of “Islamism” are sure to emerge loudly in the 2012
election season. Such rhetoric, however, may prove even less potent at
the polls than the relatively impotent 2010 version, even if this reality
has gone largely unnoticed by the national media.
For those who live outside the precincts where right-wing virtual reality
reigns supreme, facts are apparently having an impact. The vast
majority of the electorate seems to be viewing anti-Muslim alarms as a
distraction from other, far more pressing problems: real
problems.
http://aep.typepad.com/american_empire_project/2011/07/islam-baiting-doesnt-work.html#more
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