CLOSE-UP
A savvy politician, cigar-chomping James Zogby
talks like a Chicago ward heeler and is a member
of Jesse Jackson's inner circle, but the Mideast
is never far from his thoughts.
The Arab-Americans'
Street Smart Activist
JAMES DAVID BESSER
Washington Correspondent
is answers are long and circuitous,
and he has a press secretary's
knack for fending off uncomfor-
table questions. Only occasionally does he
allow himself to hint at the anger that is
embedded in the political movement he has
helped create.
But you can read Jim Zogby like a book;
this obvious quality, in fact, is one impor-
tant measure of his success.
Zogby is an American classic — an
ethnic politician with one eye on the meat-
and-potatoes issues of local politics,
another on the dramatic national and
international issues that can crystallize
communities into constituencies.
His progress as a political organizer, in
some ways, parallels the path taken by the
early pioneers of Jewish political clout. But
Zogby says that his generation is im-
patient with the slow pace of earlier days.
What he hopes to do is vault over the
transitional stages of political empower-
ment. What he hopes for, in fact, is a direct
pipeline into the White House.
Zogby is an Arab-American. More to the
point, he is the key figure in an increasing-
ly sophisticated movement aimed at bring-
ing Arab-Americans into the political
mainstream, starting down at the level
where shopowners slug it out with precinct
captains for city services.
His organization, the Arab American
Institute, is officially oriented more toward,
the concerns of Syrian grocers in Detroit
than toward the ziggurat of diplomacy in
the Middle East. But from the posters on
his office wall to his frequent complaints
about the power of the pro-Israel lobby, it
is clear that the Middle East is never far
from his thoughts.
"There was a time when people didn't
acknowledge that we were a constituency,"
Zogby says. "AIPAC (the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee) and the Anti-
Defamation League wrote a book in which
they sought to characterize us as an ar-
tificial constituency put together by petro-
H
James Zogby: The politician's knack for self-control.
Craig Terkowit