American Student Hides Support for Bush
Thu Oct 14, 8:48 AM ET Europe -
AP By MORT ROSENBLUM, AP Special Correspondent
PARIS - Jennifer Locke, a bright-eyed blonde New Yorker, drags on her cigarette and nods to pals at the American University of Paris. She'd be just one of the gang but for a deep, dirty secret. At 21, living among the fractious French who mostly revile President Bush (news - web sites), Jennifer Locke votes Republican.
AP Photo
"I'm always the one on the other side," she lamented with a bitter laugh, recounting the insults and near violence she draws out when she champions Bush.
"There are 800 students in this school, and I think I'm the only one who admits to being Republican," Locke said. That is likely an exaggeration, she acknowledges. But, she adds, it's close enough.
For a heavy majority of young Americans in Paris, like the French they mingle with, opposition to war in Iraq (news - web sites) is an article of faith. Many blame Bush for a new anti-American tide in Europe.
At AUP, Americans and English-speaking foreigners study at a campus scattered across a bourgeois part of the Left Bank, between the Eiffel Tower and Les Invalides. Political feelings can run high. Once Locke heard an American student suggest in class that all Republicans should be killed. No one objected, she said, not even the professor. If he was joking, Locke did not find it funny.
When she got here in 2000, she flaunted a huge "I Miss Reagan" button. Her family is rockbound Republican, even if one black sheep great grandparent voted Democrat, and the late Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) was her childhood hero.
Sometimes she wore a Bush pin, although most of her friends and fellow students had backed Al Gore (news - web sites). "I kind of stopped after 9/11," Locke said. "I didn't want the hassle." Instead, she took to wearing camouflage, a pin reading, "Bush," with a "not" line across it. "You can't imagine the difference an anti-Bush pin makes," she said. "People smile, give me thumbs-up signs. Everyone responds. It's disgusting."
The U.S. presidential election has generated extraordinary interest in France, where there is a widespread feeling that the fate of the civilized world hangs in the balance. Although the debates between Bush and Democratic contender John Kerry (news - web sites) take place in the middle of the night Paris time, many people here have followed them closely. The influential daily Le Monde carried a transcript of the first debate in French, and large audiences watched retransmissions the next morning on CNN. Locke said she planned to watch a rebroadcast of Wednesday's final debate, which was to be shown at the AUP bar on Thursday. "Unless Bush says something really dumb, it's not going to change much for me," she said. "Everyone else will be yelling for Kerry."
Locke surfaced in an informal sampling of AUP students at a broadcast journalism course. When an AP reporter asked students who favored Bush, her hand shot up. Most students accused Bush of spurring terrorism and alienating America's old allies, but Locke, an international affairs major whose ambition is to be an anchor on Fox News, stuck to her guns. Later, she produced an essay she recently sent to her former paper at Masteus School in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. In it, she described what happened when she wore a button a friend brought her from Washington that proclaimed: Proud to be a Republican. "Some snickered, others asked if it was a joke," she wrote. "Some asked if I was in the Ku Klux Klan as well. It's a PIN, for God's sake!!!" "A waiter," she wrote, "looked as if he was going to spit in my pizza. A man in the dining hall asked me what the pin said, twice, and then walked away. I felt like dirt. I felt worse than dirt." An old friend saw the pin and started a fight, she added. "The people around me didn't defend me; they stood there and glared!!! ... Just because I'm a Republican doesn't mean I'm the anti-Christ."
In her broadcast journalism course, students who opposed Bush showed muted enthusiasm for John Kerry. Liz Mott, 20, an American born in Paris, said she watched the first debate and felt a deep sense that another four years of Bush would endanger the world to a greater degree. "Everything Bush said was stupid," she put it.
Mafumba Rosiji, 21, Nigerian-born but with an English accent from growing up in London, said she soured on Bush when she saw that his rationale for invading Iraq seemed to be invented. "I don't appreciate being misled," she said. "If you go after Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) just because he is a dictator, what about all the dictators in Africa and elsewhere in the world?" Locke, too, said she was disturbed by some of Bush's positions. "His proposed amendment to ban gay marriages really upsets me," she said.
On this point, she added, she stormed out of a restaurant after a violent argument with her father. But even with strong evidence that the Bush administration exaggerated the threat of weapons of mass destruction, Locke supports the war on Iraq. "There is always deception in politics," she said. "There always has been. I don't like being lied to, either, but I see the purpose. I don't want to know about everything all the time."
In the end, Locke said, another Bush administration would stabilize an unruly world and revitalize America's economy. But that, she acknowledges, is a lonely viewpoint in France. "I'm always presenting the case to friends, but not many people listen," she concluded. "I converted one girl. But I think she has switched back again."
