As of Monday the 16th, the New York-based San Francisco Chronicle has published eight consecutive front-page stories about Chinese American community powerhouse Julie Lee, her allies and California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley over election irregularities.
Don’t expect front-page headlines to stop with the election season heating up — and juicier expansion targets abound: former Mayor Willie Brown and current Mayor Gavin Newsom have both benefited from Lee’s support.
I’d also predict that hapa District Attorney Kamala Harris will join City Attorney Dennis Herrera in the investigations.
Harris ran into her own campaign-finance controversy last year but took responsibility and survived to win a come-from-behind election as DA.
HIGH-TECH LYNCHING?: Do you think this Lee-Shelley story is over the top? It’s bumped the Scott Peterson trial — even mistress Amber Frey’s sex, lies and secret tape-recordings — and the ongoing Iraq War to the back pages or to “below the fold” on the front page.
CHILLING EFFECT: The daily’s coverage could have damning effects on APA empowerment. Its lurid quality and the subsequent investigations will make all APA political activists think twice. More negatively, it foreshadows increased scrutiny of any candidate supported by APA donors. Those major candidates raising money for the upcoming November 2004 election and next year’s campaigns include: supervisor candidates Lillian Sing, Myrna Lim, and Rose Tsai; State Assembly candidate Fiona Ma; and school and college board candidates Norman Yee, Eric Mar, Jane Kim and Rodel Rodis.
Four years ago, District 7 supervisor challenger Tony Hall charged that 80 percent of Mabel Teng’s campaign donors for re-election were from “off-shore money, specifically from Hong Kong and various other places.” It was untrue, but Teng lost re-election by only 34 votes.
CHINAGATE: The Hall charge of off-shore money was the same one made after the 1996 presidential campaign, when Bill Clinton’s Asian American contributions came under attack. Eventually, John Huang took the fall for illegally raising $156,000 in donations for Democratic and Republican officials. To this day, Asian American fundraisers are still trying to recover their credibility.
In 1997, the Democratic National Committee started vetting donors with Asian surnames — an act of racial profiling for which the DNC later apologized. APAs and the ACLU filed a complaint with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights over the “discriminatory impact” of the campaign-fundraising scandal. The scandal was costly — delaying the appointment of Norman Mineta as commerce secretary and derailing the appointment of former UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien as energy secretary.
CATCH THE WAVE: Probate attorney Jason Louie, a former aide to Assemblyman Leland Yee, is catching the early ripples of a demographic “ticking time bomb” in the APA community; he was pitching his business cards at the recent National Association of Asian American Professionals conference at the Palace Hotel.
“In 10 years, I’ll probably be getting people walking in my office telling me: ‘I have this problem. Twenty years ago, my mom put the kids’ names on the house. Mom’s died now. We have this problem with the IRS,’” Louie said.
“In the Sunset and Richmond, I see Chinese middle-class families putting their kids’ names on their homes to avoid this estate and probate [tax] problem … ,” he said.
The waves of immigrants who settled in San Francisco are growing ripe for retirement, having been here since their arrival under the 1965 Immigration Act. With home-owning rates high among APAs, the retirees are leaving real estate valued at around a cool half million.
Louie’s no ambulance-, or in his case, hearse-chasing attorney. Probate courts come looking for him. “Because of demographics, they have more Asians dying in probate court,” he said.
Out of some three dozen probate lawyers in the city, three or four are APA.
“We all know each other,” he said.
STRAPLESS IN THE SUNSET: Jennifer Lin’s words to the wise: Don’t wear a strapless wedding gown in frigid, foggy Sunset in the winter of San Francisco’s summer. She and her spouse, Jeannie Louie, donned their gay apparel for an Aug. 8 first-ever APA demonstration for same-sex marriage at Larsen Park in the Sunset. Attended by 500, the “Summer of Love 2004” rally took place in a conservative corner of town where last spring more than 7,000 people — mostly Chinese — gathered to protest against the movement for same-sex marriage, which suffered a defeat in the state Supreme Court last week.
TRADITIONAL VALUES: Lin talked about her own traditional values: “When I was growing up, there were really only three things that my parents wanted for me: Find someone Chinese. Two, get married. Three, give them grandchildren. Well, 10 years ago I met someone Chinese. And this year, I married her. … I’m still working on the grandchildren part.
“I’m trying to convince my parents that having two cats are just as good,” she said. Meow.
SOMETHING RANK: Ranked-choice voting was supposed to eliminate negative campaigning. Well, incumbent Supervisor Jake McGoldrick is attacking retired Judge Lillian Sing for being a captive of downtown interests. Funny how the attacks are coming from McGoldrick — who’s putting the “rank” in “ranked-choice voting.”
It’s actually a good sign for Sing that McGoldrick is worried about his own re-election and resorting to negative attacks against the good judge, who’s had to uphold strict judicial canons of ethics for more than 21 years.
Samson Wong can be reached at (415) 321-5886, faxed at 415-397-7258 or e-mailed at swong@asianweek.com.