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 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."
