Republican Blues
By ROGER COHEN
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.
Fazal Fazlin has an American story. Raised in Karachi, Pakistan, he came to the United States in 1969 with an engineering degree and little else. Now he lives on a five-acre estate in the waterfront mansion that once belonged to Nelson Poynter, luminary of the newspaper business.
Poynter, who died in 1978, was the owner of The St. Petersburg Times, a bastion of journalistic excellence and liberal tradition.
Liberalism was never Fazlin’s thing. For most of his rags-to-riches American life, he was a Nixon Republican.
“I felt Nixon was a great President,” Fazlin, a dapper 58, told me. “He opened relations with China, and that’s what kept inflation down. He had a really good command of the world.”
So perhaps it’s surprising to see “Obama for President” signs outside the Poynter-Fazlin mansion and learn that Fazlin, joining long lines of early-voting Florida residents, has already cast his ballot for the Democratic candidate after twice voting for Bush.
But I’m not surprised. Lifelong Republicans turning to Obama has been one of the themes I’ve picked up in this campaign, ever since, back in January, I ran into Bryant Jones, an Idaho-raised Republican who’d volunteered for Obama in South Carolina.
For Jones, it was disenchantment with “my-way-or-the-highway politics and the same old faces.” For Fazlin, the Republican Party has “forgotten itself.”
That phrase resonated. This election has also been about the ideological exhaustion of a party. What was John McCain’s vice-presidential pick but a Hail Sarah pass reflecting the desperation of a Republican trying to succeed Bush?
Fazlin’s Republican Party, he told me over lunch, “was for less government and it was fiscally conservative. But look at the spending under Bush. We are trillions in debt. My granddaughter will pay for that.”
His Republican Party believed in a link between hard work and reward rather than between securitized toxic mortgage loans and instant fortunes. His Republican Party believed in transactions based on reality. “I had to jump through hoops for my first mortgage,” Fazlin said.
The party’s cultural shift also troubles him. In the party he joined, the Christian Right was insignificant. He sees a link between its rise and “an attitude toward Muslims that I really don’t like. Muslim cannot mean terrorist, but some of the emails I get suggest Republicans don’t see the difference.”
A Muslim himself, Fazlin was pleased to hear another Republican-to-Obama convert, Gen. Colin Powell, say: “Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president?”
American openness allowed Fazlin to make his way. He worked for Zenith in Chicago, then Control Data in Minneapolis, where he came up with “a process to change the surface energy of Teflon.”
I associate Teflon with easy-to-flip eggs, but apparently I missed something, which is probably why I’m a hack and he’s rich.
Fazlin’s breakthrough was important for circuit boards of high-speed computers. He moved on to plasma technology, founding Advanced Plasma in St. Petersburg in 1980.
Nineteen years later, he sold the company “for a few bucks,” enough to buy the Poynter estate. It was here that his far-flung family (from Pakistan, Canada and Australia) gathered for his birthday in June — and gave him the decisive prod into the Obama camp.
They asked: What’s happened to America? Why is it so heavy-handed? Why won’t it sit down, eyeball to eyeball, with its enemies and try to work things out? Fazlin considered those good questions.
He switched allegiance, helping to organize a fundraiser for Obama in Orlando. There, he met Obama and liked “the way he looked me in the eye, the way he wasn’t on a pedestal, but one of us.” He also liked Obama’s efficiency (and believes it could save the government money). They talked politics and Pakistani cuisine.
The Fazlin conversion is significant. Among Republicans flipping to Obama I’ve detected three core feelings: we have to do something different; we cannot be the party of fiscal irresponsibility; we cannot be the angry party of an “America-first” jingoism that alienates the world.
There’s something more, something unspoken. Reagan’s line was, “It’s morning again in America.” Bush has been about American dusk. Republicans are hard-headed but not to the point they want hope banished from the national vocabulary.
Enter Obama.
In Miami, I found more of the Fazlin phenomenon. Andy Gomez, an assistant professor at the University of Miami and a Cuban-American, told me his immediate family is made up of five registered Republicans and one Democrat.
Of that heavily Republican band, five, including Gomez himself, are voting Obama.
“Cuba’s not the issue,” he said. “It’s education, health care, the economy.”
Florida’s still a toss-up, but there’s Obama movement.
As Fazlin swept his Mercedes up the drive, I suggested the colonnaded mansion with its cascading bougainvillea was a Spanish colonial.
“What? I just think of it as Fazal style,” he said.
This is a great country. Hispano-Pakistani is fine. The past is prelude. Only the future counts. It looms tomorrow. |
