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Letters to the Editor

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Locke Calls for Careful Vote Count

Editor’s Note: The following was distributed via mass e-mail by Washington Gov. Gary Locke’s press office, in response to Vice President Al Gore’s Nov. 7 address to the nation.

Dear Editor: I support an open, complete and fair counting process. All votes should be carefully counted and, if need be, the courts should resolve any disputes in an impartial manner. I believe in our system and we should allow it to work. We should all be encouraged by the fact that this matter has the attention of the highest court in the land.

Something this important should not be rushed or completed in a haphazard way. Let’s be thoughtful and thorough so there will be no lingering questions when all is said and done.

As Vice President Gore said this evening, our country will be stronger if it follows a process most people see as fair.

Washington State Governor Gary Locke
via e-mail

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Political Maturity and Democracy

Dear Editor: Our community’s political clout ultimately depends on our political maturity. The on-going recount in Florida may be a good lesson for nurturing this maturity.

TV reporters covering the recount understand politics. Lawyers working for either camp and high level campaign staff who’ll get cushy jobs upon their boss’ victory have a lot of personal interest vested in the outcome of the recount. However, do you see them expressing outrage or belittling the moves and counter-moves initiated by the other camp? No! Why not? They all know that had the situation been reversed, Gore’s camp would act like the Bush camp and vice versa. In an election, candidates and political parties say and do things primarily to win the election.

That is the kind of political maturity that most American people have. They’ve heard, since their youth, discussions between their parents on how political games were played, and how citizens could use election years to advance their interests, preferably long-term enlightened interests. They’ve gone through enough elections themselves to know that campaign rhetoric is not to be taken seriously. They’ve lived under enough presidents to know what type of leaders are more likely to be consistent with their best enlightened interests.

Asian Americans must note. A few individuals, not knowing politics and yet playing politics, gave our entire community such a bad image during the “Campaign Finance Scandal.” They thought that working for the president gave them immunity to do illegal things. In the United States, it is just the opposite: So long as citizens are observing law, they could fight with the president with immunity.

Don’t belittle our election system and politicians owing to the recount. To many, it is democracy in action.

S.B. Woo
via e-mail

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And Now a Station Break

Editor’s Note: The following letter was sent via mass e-mail.

Dear Editor: Any individual seeking political office must take positions on dozens, even hundreds of issues upon which he has no deep knowledge or strong convictions. The true measure of a leader is best understood by examining those one or two issues upon which he will never accept any compromise. That represents the fundamental reason he is running.

For Ronald Reagan, that one issue was resistance to Soviet Communism. For Jimmy Carter, it was human rights. For Barbara Boxer or Gary Bauer, it would be abortion. For others, perhaps the environment or the Second Amendment or Gay Rights. One learns much about a man by discovering that one deeply buried principle upon which he will stand his ground regardless of whatever pressure he might face.

During the recent presidential campaign, one sought in vain to discover any such deep principle in either Vice President Al Gore or Gov. George W. Bush, either from their campaign speeches or from the record of their past positions. Both men had twisted and turned considerably in their political careers — or been complete blanks — and now seemed all too ready to compromise much of what remained.

Thus, an important benefit derived from the ongoing battle in Florida has been to reveal the one overarching ideological principle upon which the personal belief systems of both our presidential candidates are based: whether or not dimpled chads should be counted as pregnant.

Clearly both Bush and Gore are fully capable of adapting the lofty rhetoric of one of our greatest presidents, pledging their sacred honor that a Government of the Chad, by the Chad, and for the Chad must not be allowed to vanish from the earth. Each candidate might compromise on anything else once in office, but we can rest assured that each will expend every ounce of hoarded political capital to enact national legislation on the interpretation of chads.

However, while our entire nation follows Florida’s endlessly fascinating debate over just how dimpled a chad must be before it is considered pregnant, a few other, far more trivial matters are proceeding along, generating occasional blips of attention.

One such inconsequential issue is whether or not millions of immigrant children living in America should be taught to read and write English when they go to school. The voters of California and now Arizona have said ‘Yes,’ but at present most of the remaining 48 other states still say ‘No,’ as do both of our national chad disputants. While Bush and Gore and their armies of lawyers and retainers may fiercely dispute every bump in a chad, they both (for now at least) appear foursquare behind Spanish-only instruction for immigrant children in American schools.

Consider this note a mere station-break in our nation’s ongoing drama: the Great War of the Dimpled Chad.

Ron Unz
via e-mail

AsianWeek welcomes letters commenting on our coverage and other topics of interes to Asian Pacific Americans. Please keep letters as brief as possible (we reserve the right to edit letters for length and style), and include your name and a daytime telephone number for verification. For letters by conventional mail, address to: AsianWeek, 809 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, California 94108, U.S.A.