Without calming voice, GOP is letting divisive ones speak on Muslims
But with many conservatives in the Obama years now seeing themselves as under siege, there are significant incentives for would-be leaders to cater to what Lewis called “their sense of victimhood.”
For Democrats, there is an opening to use the criticism of Islam to portray Republicans as intolerant, reinforcing an image that has damaged the party’s brand.
“I call on every Republican to denounce Dr. Carson’s disgusting remarks,” Sen. Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, said on the Senate floor Monday, posting a photograph on Twitter of the star-andcrescent-bedecked headstone of a Muslim American soldier who died in Iraq.
Muslim leaders also denounced Carson.
“My heart was so saddened to hear those words come out of the mouth of an individual who is seeking the highest office in our land,” said Mahdi Bray, an imam and director of the American Muslim Alliance, at a news conference in Washington. “Not only because it’s inconsistent with the United States Constitution, but what do I tell my kids?”
While Muslims are viewed more skeptically by the American public than are members of any other faith, Republicans are especially uneasy about Islam. A Pew survey last year asking individuals to rate, from 1 to 100, their feelings about religious groups found that Muslims only averaged 33 percent among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters — far below other faiths.
Evangelical Christians, in particular, are wary about Muslims, according to the research. Carson is an evangelical and has found appeal among this constituency in his presidential bid.
But concern about Islam extends more broadly on the right. Despite Obama’s release of his birth certificate, false claims about his place of birth and faith persist among some conservatives. A full 60 percent of Republicans said they viewed Islam unfavorably in a 2013 New York Times-CBS poll.
Those views were on display last week in New Hampshire when Donald J. Trump replied that he would be “looking at that” when a man attending a Trump town hall meeting called Obama a Muslim and said the country needs to “get rid of them.”
Trump’s reaction was strikingly different from that of Sen. John McCain, who, in the 2008 presidential campaign, was confronted by a similar voter. “He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues,” McCain said to a woman who called Obama “an Arab.”
It was also far removed from Bush’s response in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Fourteen years to the day before Carson’s comments on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Bush, in an address to a joint session of Congress, drew a distinction between adherents of radical Islam and peaceful Muslims.
“The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics — a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam,” Bush said then.
He was, aides recall, concerned about the safety of American Muslims in the tumultuous days after the assault on New York and the Pentagon. But he also wanted to send a longer-term message abroad that America intended to strike back only at jihadis.
Carson’s rhetoric undermines that effort, former Bush aides said.
“What’s dangerous about what he said is that it sends the wrong message to the rest of the world,” said Tony Fratto, a former press secretary to Bush. “That somehow the actions we take for very legitimate national security reasons have anti-Muslim roots. We’ve worked so hard to try to make it clear that that isn’t the case. But each time somebody does this kind of thing, it makes it harder.”
Henry Olsen, a scholar at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, said it would be enough for many Republicans if the party’s candidates asserted that America’s adversaries were inspired by radical Islam.
But, Olsen said, it was incumbent on party leaders to recognize the difference between jihadis and the Muslim population at large in the same way that, during the Cold War, Americans differentiated between the country’s social democratic allies and communists. But such distinctions can be easily lost, or intentionally blurred, when conservatives do not have a leader and candidates like Trump and Carson see an opportunity to channel voters’ anxieties.
“Having a leaderless party makes it more likely that those voices that were always there can arise,” Fratto said.