Is Bush Playing the Ethnic Card in His Foreign Policy?

As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush made a big show of his efforts to attract Latino support. As president, he made a show of the importance he places on U.S. relations with Mexico by taking his first foreign trip to Mexico last week to meet President Vicente Fox. Is Bush trying to graft Mexican Americans onto the Republican coalition and unwittingly fostering the rise of another ethnic foreign-policy lobby at the same time?

Maybe so, if, as anticipated, Bush names a Mexican American from Texas as ambassador to Mexico. In any case, some observers believe the Bush administration heralds a new era of Latino participation in national government and in U.S. relations with Latin America. But, historically, there may be less going on here than meets the eye.

There is no question that Bush sees cultivating Latino political support and emphasizing Latin American policy as two sides of the same coin. As governor of Texas, he attracted Mexican American voters in large part by being friendly with Mexico. But this is hardly a novel strategy for presidents. At least since Harry S. Truman, who rushed to recognize the new state of Israel in 1948 to boost his electoral prospects, Democrats have accepted ethnic lobbying on foreign policy as legitimate and have often used foreign policy to attract ethnic votes.

Former President Bill Clinton was especially open to this strategy. As a candidate in 1992, he went farther than President George Bush to appeal for Cuban American votes and campaign contributions when he favored tightening the Cuba trade embargo. In office, Clinton scuttled the appointment of a prominent lawyer to the State Department because he wasn't liked by the Cuba lobby, reluctantly agreed to yet another tightening of the embargo and, as a favor to presidential candidate Al Gore, killed a bipartisan review of Cuba policy that was opposed by Cuban Americans.

There are many other Clinton examples: his pro-Irish tilt, which initially irked U.S. ally Great Britain, in his pursuit of a Northern Ireland peace agreement; his retention of more Jewish Americans in policy positions relating to the Middle East than any previous administration; and his intervention in Haiti partly in response to pressure from the Congressional Black Caucus and the African American lobby TransAfrica. Some foreign-policy analysts even attributed Clinton's support for the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as primarily a bid for Polish American votes.