What Would Bush Do About the Ground Zero Mosque?
Updated: 10 hours 35 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (Aug. 17) -- The political battle over plans to build an Islamic center two blocks from ground zero is reaching biblical proportions as Republicans pummel President Barack Obama
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Monday compared the center -- which many prominentsupport -- to Nazis trying to protest outside a Holocaust museum. Republican campaign staffers send out e-mails placing Obama on the same page as the leader of Hamas. And GOP candidates in places far away from lower Manhattan quickly launched TV ads declaring, "Mr. President, ground zero is the wrong place for a mosque." and Democrats for being insensitive to victims of 9/11. Jewish officials
Doug Mills, AP
Then-President George W. Bush, center, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, left, and other officials look toward at the site of the fallen buildings during a tour of the World Trade Center on Sept. 14, 2001.
But amid all the overheated rhetoric, some may wonder what former President George W. Bush might say about all this.
For now, nothing.
A spokesman for the former president told AOL News that Bush would have no comment on the matter.
But days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush had much to say about the need for religious tolerance even after Islamic extremists carried out the worst foreign attack in history on U.S. soil.
"The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam," Bush said at the Islamic Center of Washington in a speech that set the tenor for when he later sent U.S. troops to fight on Muslim soil in Afghanistan and later Iraq. "That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war."
He went on to say, in words that Democrats who disagreed with Bush on nearly every issue now recall fondly, that despite raw emotions, millions of American Muslims "need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect."
Nearly nine years later, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson echoed the message of his old boss. Writing in The Washington Post, he defended Obama. Unlike pundits, he wrote, "A president does not merely have opinions; he has duties to the Constitution and to the citizens he serves -- including millions of Muslim citizens."
Gerson went on to say that "those who want a president to assert that any mosque would defile the neighborhood near ground zero are asking him to undermine the war on terrorism. A war on Islam would make a war on terrorism impossible."
American Muslims who protested the Bush administration's treatment of detainees at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, say they long for the former president to speak out against the rhetoric of his fellow Republicans.
"President Bush would have said more or less the same thing as President Obama, only President Bush wouldn't have come under attack from extremists for saying so," Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told AOL News. "Any leader has to take a position based on principle and not on a sense of mob rule."
Hooper accused elected officials like House Minority Leader John Boehner -- who called the proposed mosque "deeply troubling, as is the president's decision to endorse it" -- of trying to score "cheap political points based on hysteria and Islamophobia."
Mixing Politics and Religion
Though his message would get muddled over the weekend, Obama's initial impulse to strongly support the Islamic center sparked a firestorm of protest that was a reminder why mixing politics and religion can be a volatile brew.
"As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country," he said Friday at a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan.
J. Scott Applewhite, AP
President Barack Obama hosts an iftar dinner, the meal that breaks the dawn-to-dusk fast for Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan, in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, Friday, Aug. 13, 2010. For over a billion Muslims, Ramadan is a time of intense devotion and reflection.
With two of three Americans opposed to the so-called ground zero mosque, GOP leaders saw an opening in a year when Democrats were already expected to lose seats in November's election. Republicans privately spoke with glee about how the issue put Democrats on the defensive. One strategist who didn't want his name used said it "will ultimately lead some to question the president's motives."
Obama should never have opened his mouth, said GOP pollster Whit Ayres. "It's a political plus for Republicans if they frame it as a local issue with security implications that needs to be resolved at the local level, not at the national level," he said. "This will be one more point in a long litany of points about how the president and the Democratic leadership are out of step with the thinking of most Americans."
White House spokesman Bill Burton, asked about criticism of the president's remarks, said, "I can't speak to the politics of what the Republicans are doing. And the president didn't do this because of the politics. He spoke about it because he feels he has an obligation as the president to address this."
Apparently the most powerful Democrat in the Senate didn't get the message as candidates far from New York sought to distance themselves from Obama.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, fighting to keep his seat in Nevada against a challenge from tea party Republican Sharron Angle, came out against the planned Islamic center, saying it "should be built some place else."
That prompted Angle to tweet "Nice of you to join us" even as Republican campaign staffers e-mailed that it was "regrettable that he hasn't demonstrated this same independence from President Obama on the critical issues facing America during the last 19 months."
The controversy "could be a useful one for some Republicans, especially in conservative states and districts," said John Green, a University of Akron political scientist who studies the intersection of politics and religion.
"Much of the Republican base is likely to disagree with Obama and the cost at the ballot box may be small because Muslims are not very numerous and not very popular in the public," he said.
But Green warned that in the long run the issue could backfire on Republicans because of the country's growing religious diversity. "It is an issue like immigration, with some short-term advantages for the GOP in many places but a long-term disadvantage in the nation as a whole," he said.
"Politically it wasn't smart or necessary for President Obama to wade into this controversy. It just adds another unappetizing side dish to the Democrats' full plate of problems heading to November," said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. "But we've seen a long list of so-called political game changers fail to change much, including the BP oil spill, immigration and gay marriage. This election is about the economy, and it's going to stay that way."
Republican strategist Ron Bonjean agreed that other issues are uppermost in voters' minds but warned against underestimating the impact of Obama's remarks on the mosque.
"Jobs and the economy will remain the top issues of this election," he said, "but President Obama's comments can be used to remind Americans just how disconnected the White House is from voters who wonder why he decided to involve himself in the matter."
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