Salon: Bush*s Haiti Nightmare

[kskiska]

U.S. mishandling of the Caribbean coup could cost the president votes not only in Miami's "Little Haiti," but among Florida blacks and Cuban Americans, too.

By Tim Grieve

(snip)

While Haiti may not be a critical issue for many voters, it is daily front-page news in Florida, a state Bush won -- at least according to former Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris -- by just over 500 votes in 2000. Even if just a few hundred votes turn on Haiti, Bush and John Kerry will be fighting for each one of them.

For Bush, the landmines await in every direction -- and he has already stepped on some of them. Because of the complexities of Florida's relationship to the Caribbean, the administration's Haiti moves could affect not only the votes of Haitian-Americans, analysts here say, but also the votes of African-Americans and Cuban-Americans. Democrats initially attacked Bush for moving too slowly to stop the bloodshed in Haiti. Now the administration is under siege from Democrats and reporters demanding that Bush come clean on whether Aristide left voluntarily, as the administration claims, or was kidnapped by American forces who wanted to see him gone.

Haitian-Americans, who make up a small but growing voting bloc in Florida, want a safe welcome for refugees who might flee the country. African-American Floridians, already angry with Bush and with voting-rights abuses that blocked many of them from the polls in 2000, won't be happy to see TV news footage of U.S. Coast Guard troops sending black kids on rafts back to a war zone. White Floridians don't want to see another wave of boat people on their shores.

And if it turns out that the United States played an active role in removing Aristide from Haiti -- at the very least, the administration's public pronouncements made it hard for him to stay -- Bush will face questions about how he could oust an Iraqi dictator in the name of promoting democracy while allowing the ouster of a democratically elected leader closer to home.

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http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/03/04/haiti/index.html