Far from a Representation
October 19, 2000
The U.S. Senate will not look like America after Nov. 7. Neither will the House of Representatives. Neither will the 50 state legislatures. The next president and vice president will be white males, as always. One of them, for the first time, may be of a non-Christian faith, but neither major party had the guts to consider a woman for the top roles.
The debates of the last few weeks did not include candidates likely to win hundreds of thousands or millions of votes (such as Ralph Nader of the Green Party—or others—see www.politics1.com), and one of whom (Patrick Buchanan) is receiving federal matching funds because his party (the Reform Party) won more than 5 percent of the popular vote in 1996. Significant issues like the unhappy dominance of the electoral process by big-money forces did not get appropriate airtime because the Commission on Presidential Debates (www.debates.org) itself is a partisan creature controlled by Republican and Democratic party apparatchiks who prefer to keep us fixated on a two-way race.
It is important to remember the big picture: We are far from having a representative democracy. And despite the protests of white advantaged males that they feel discriminated against by affirmative action programs, there has never been a woman or person of color in the top roles in the executive branch, and we are still far, far away from gender or race parity in our highest state and federal elective offices.
There are positives to acknowledge. From where I sit in Washington, D.C., four political developments deserve special recognition in terms of moving Asian Americans forward during this campaign cycle:
* The growth of 80-20 into a bi-partisan national organization of over 300,000 members;
* The continuing vision of the APAICS-UCLA Leadership academy to train our next generation of leaders;
* The efforts of Courtni Pugh and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to tailor their message to Asian American voters (the Republicans, despite having a better overall press operation, have not done enough to reach Asian American voters); and
* The development of the new AAA Fund as an overtly Asian American political action committee (PAC) that is not controlled by just one family or group.
On the down side, there are three developments that show just how far we as a community still have to go in terms of our growth as political players:
* A lack of enough candidates to give us anything close to racial parity (3 - 4 percent of the population is Asian American, but the percentage of Asian American elected officials is far less);
* A lack of enough political muscle to demand key political appointments (Bill Lann Lee and Norman Mineta’s appointments were fantastic, but the former was successfully blocked by Republicans for years, and the latter came at the end of the Clinton Administration when it could have happened years earlier); and
* The Wen Ho Lee debacle, which, despite a temporarily happy ending, resurrected the old “any Asian is a potential foreign spy” scenario.
As for the future of democracy after the Nov. 7 election, I have doubts that reforms are proceeding quickly enough to help Asian American voters or candidates. The Internet has not yet lived up to its potential to inform the electorate and bring greater accountability to the process. Lack of proportional representation continues to limit the development of third party and minority candidacies (read about the recent passing of Theodore Berry, Cincinnati’s first black mayor and a champion of proportional representation at www.fairvote.org). And the use of polls to manipulate voters instead of trying to address their concerns (as is popularly believed) has reached epidemic proportions.
In terms of the polling issue, Professors Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro have written an important new book, Politicians Don’t Pander, which states quite convincingly that polls are not being used these days to assess the public mood. Instead, polls are being used to gauge how a politician can craft a message already chosen in order to meet a goal desired only by a small group of campaign donors or others, whose beliefs might not be what the public wants.
Jacobs and Shapiro offer us a new philosophy of public governance that hopefully could reverse the erosion of popular sovereignty. First, to restore the vitality of the American democratic experiment, politicians should be responsive to centrist voter opinion or offer a credible explanation for their independence. Second, private citizens should be able to criticize government programs in public without facing a “government-backed onslaught of deceptive and manipulative claims.”
Overall, Campaign 2000 has seen the birth or growth of trends that may be of long-term help to Asian Americans. But the countervailing undemocratic trends are so daunting that Asian Americans, along with their fellow Americans of all backgrounds, are best advised to re-commit themselves to the democratic process no matter who wins the White House on Nov. 7.
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