Non-Endorsement and Irrelevance

Update--10/21: The American Muslim Taskforce has just announced a "qualified endorsement" of Senator Kerry. The statement calls for a "protest vote against the oppressive order of the Bush Administration."

Our exclusive report on the Muslim organizations' expected non-endorsement of a presidential candidate generated an AP story yesterday that confirmed the substance of our piece. (It's not often that MWU! will scoop the Associated Press--in fact, it probably won't happen again in the near future--so do allow us to gloat just a little, in a very spiritual Ramadan sort of way of course.)

As we suspected, the Kerry folks, although they would have liked the endorsement, never thought that they really needed it. They're probably right. As a Kerry campaign spokesman told AP, "At this late point in the election cycle, we are trying to turn supporters into voters and recent polling shows we have support among American Muslims 10-to-1."

Although there is truth to the claims that a non-endorsement was the right way to go at this late stage in the campaign, it is also a reflection of a badly managed election strategy by the American Muslim Taskforce that has rendered the Muslim organizations ineffective with both major political parties.

Muslim organizations have been talking up their members' lopsided opposition to Bush since last Winter, publicly announcing survey results of their membership and email list subscribers that showed Bush in the single digits in some cases.

By doing this, they effectively shut themselves out from the process and left themselves with little chance of getting anything of value out of either candidate. If Muslims are so anti-Bush, then why should the Bush/Cheney campaign even bother with talking to AMT and risk alienating some of their Christian right supporters by engaging with a coalition in which CAIR is a member. By the same token, Kerry's campaign, as the Democratic spokesman confirmed in the quote above, didn't think they really needed Muslim groups' support, since these groups had already shown their cards.

So all this left AMT between a rock and a hard place--either endorse Kerry because clearly most Muslims plan to vote for him but without receiving any special crumbs thrown their way about the Patriot Act or no-fly lists or assets to be unfrozen (rock), or issue no endorsement at all which leaves them open for criticism that they don't respect or listen to their constituency and to the charge they are really trying to tacitly support the Bush campaign (hard place).

In other words, the only reason that non-endorsement makes sense now is that AMT dropped the ball months ago. Instead of being able to engage either party and making a difference for their constituents by negotiating some relief from the oppressive weight of the Patriot Act, they were relegated to traveling around with Ralph Nader and third-party candidates from the Green and Libertarian Parties, to whom they were never really committed on principle. And the more they were seen with these third parties, the more they marginalized themselves in the eyes of the Democrats and Republicans, the people that they really cared about.

So once again, we're left with the aftermath of ineptitude and an utter lack of sophistication about the American political process.

No wonder they have earned the wrath of veteran political operators like the Arab American Institute's Jim Zogby, a member of the Democratic Party's Executive Committee, who lashed out strongly at their tactics. The Muslim groups don't know what it means to work in coalitions, Zogby told me. If they really prioritized the issue of civil rights, as AMT claimed from the beginning, then they would have needed to demonstrate that commitment by seriously working together with African American, Latino, Asian, Women's, and even gay rights groups. They didn't, and they probably won't in the near future since they are held back by these organizations' socially conservative leaderships that would rather make nice with an anti-immigrant group than be caught dead supporting a woman's right to choose.

Ahmed Nassef is Editor-in-Chief of MWU!