Kerry Isn’t the Panacea for the Poor
July 30, 2004
Last week, as the Democrats were pouring into Boston to start their convention, President Bush spoke before the National Urban League. He posed three questions to his mostly African American audience that deserve to be raised in the Asian Pacific American community as well.
Saying that he came from the party of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, and wanted to “earn” the votes of a community that had voted against him by a 9-1 margin in 2000, Bush asked, “Does the Democratic Party take African American voters for granted?” “Have [its] traditional solutions,” he continued, “truly served [this] community?”
Finally, moving from the practical to the philosophical, he asked, “Is it a good thing for the African American community to be represented mainly by one political party?”
The timing of these questions was opportune for Republicans: A large coalition of APA media leaders had just held a rare press conference to criticize Sen. John Kerry’s latest campaign strategy. The Kerry camp plans to pump $2 million in advertising dollars into African American media outlets and $1 million into Hispanic media outlets, with no mention of APA media buys.
Finding itself on the defensive, the camp countered that APA media buys had been planned all along and that the APA vote was not being taken for granted. But the unprecedented confrontation by New California Media, a coalition of media outlets, was an important reminder that no community can be taken for granted in a tight election.
Most recently, Democrats have done a good job of bringing elected APA officials such as Washington Gov. Gary Locke and California Congressman Mike Honda into top campaign posts. They have hired APA staff members for key jobs beyond simply asking for APA votes and money. Nevertheless, Bush’s questions remain important, for several reasons.
Democrats have largely abandoned the poor in their quest to represent business and the middle class; many APAs still do not belong to this treasured socioeconomic group. The Clinton-Kerry wing of the party has not pledged to end the ill-conceived and poorly executed war in Iraq, or set a timetable to bring home our troops, and APAs are among those dying for Bush’s go-it-alone foreign policy disaster. Finally, having only two viable parties competing in an 18th-century version of democracy continues to hurt all Americans, no matter what their political affiliations.
Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, the presumptive vice presidential nominee, campaigned as the poor guy whose dad worked in the textile mills. He decried the “two Americas” that have left affordable health insurance, lifetime job security and quality education beyond the reach of many poor Americans. Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich called for universal health-care coverage, and Carol Moseley Braun, Howard Dean and the Rev. Al Sharpton also highlighted the concerns of poor and working class Americans during the early stages of the campaign season.
While this populist rhetoric was refreshing, the unfortunate fact is that these voices are a minority in the Democratic Party, which has been dominated by the business-oriented Democratic Leadership Council since President Clinton’s 1992 victory.
Kerry, who prides himself on being a deficit hawk, announced last April his “contract with America’s middle class.” While the Congressional Progressive Caucus has explicitly tried to address the concerns of the poor, Kerry has decided to play it safe with college-tuition credits, tax cuts for the middle class and middle-class health insurance as his key themes — not a hard-hitting program for universal health-care coverage, or plans for expanding the social safety net that many of us will someday need.
History teaches us that it’s better to have a social moderate like Kerry in the White House, who will be more open to consultation and pressure from advocates for the disenfranchised than Bush. But expecting a Kerry administration alone to herald a new focus on the social programs needed by APAs and others is a misguided hope.
If Kerry and the Democrats don’t use their four years in the White House to meet the needs of the poor, they might witness the growth of the Green Party or other socially progressive parties actively pushing a peace, prosperity and justice platform. A comparable phenomenon in the United Kingdom has APAs and other minorities abandoning the liberal Labour Party in favor of a third-party alternative, the Liberal Democrats — so this option is not out of the question.
Finally, no matter who wins in November, Bush’s question about whether any one party should represent the majority of APAs is a timely one, given the diversity of our community. Instead of relying on either the Democrats or Republicans to be our saviors, we should spend time pushing for structural reforms to strengthen electoral democracy, such as instant-runoff voting, proportional representation, public financing of campaigns, free television airtime and same-day voter registration.
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