In turn, his son, George W. Bush, made a special effort to court Muslims during the 2000 campaign. That was in large part at the urging of Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader, who argued that because Muslims are a socially conservative, family-oriented, business-friendly group they are a natural GOP constituency. Bush was more proactive in his outreach to Muslim American leaders than Vice President Al Gore, according to Bukhari and Robert McCaw, government affairs manager at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Bush also spoke out about surveillance of Muslims during the second presidential debate. “Arab Americans are racially profiled in what is called secret evidence,” he said. “People are stopped, and we have to do something about that.”

Exactly how well Bush did among Muslims is tough to tell. The exit polls don’t break out Muslims. A CAIR survey found that 70 percent of Muslims voted for Bush. (The CAIR number, from an unscientific study, should be taken with a healthy amount of skepticism. In a 2001 Zogby poll, more methodologically rigorous but taken nearly a year after the election, a much smaller 42 percent of Muslim Americans saying they voted for Bush, versus 31 percent for Gore.) The American Muslim Alliance estimated that 60,000 Muslims voted for Bush in Florida, a state he won by mere hundreds of votes. “George W. Bush was elected president of the United States of America because of the Muslim vote,” Norquist boasted.

Bush’s inclusive rhetoric about Muslims has been cited frequently and wistfully during the last few months, as Republicans have taken ever-more strident stands on Islam and Muslims. On September 17, 2001, just days after the attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., and delivered his famous “Islam is peace” speech. Importantly, said McCaw, it wasn’t Bush’s first time meeting with many of the leaders who appeared with him. They were on friendly terms already. “This wasn’t your ‘get the book of Muslim names and convene them,’” McCaw says.

Although Bush kept hammering home the difference between jihadists and the great mass of Muslims throughout his term, he and his party steadily lost Muslim support. In addition to the highly unpopular war in Iraq, the Bush administration became known for intensifying the very civil-liberties violations that Governor Bush had condemned during his debate against Gore.

Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Georgetown’s Muslims in the American Public Square project polled American Muslims. Almost a quarter identified as Republicans, 40 percent as Democrats, and 28 percent as independents. Three years later, those numbers were 12, 50, and 31, respectively. The 2004 poll, taken on the eve of the election, found three-quarters of Muslims planning to vote for Democrat John Kerry and just 7 percent backing Bush.