The passion is coursing through the veins of Asian American political activists around the country. Everyone seems to have come alive for this year’s presidential race, and heightened sensitivities are a good thing.
All you have to do is suggest that a candidate — especially a Democratic one — is less than responsive to our community, and, well, those become fighting words. The partisans come out of nowhere with their sticks.
Witness the response when I commented on how Barack Obama treated 80-20, a national grassroots political organization for Asian Americans.
This riled up some progressives, who bristle at any thing negative about their perceived golden boy. One reader was positively insulting in his response that resorted to name-calling of your humble scribe, as well as a personal attack of 80-20’s leader S.B. Woo, a former lieutenant governor of Delaware.
Little was said about the substance of the column, which simply asked why Obama didn’t respond to a fairly innocuous questionnaire by 80-20 that asked all the candidates for a commitment to APAs on employment rights and federal judgeships, including the Supreme Court.
80-20 got all the answers back from most of the major Democratic candidates, but not from Obama. Nothing like a political organization spurned. It began a “Defeat Obama” Internet campaign.
A tad extreme? Perhaps. But in last week’s column, I asked for Obama’s peeps to let me know why the senator didn’t answer in a timely fashion.
In a response from the Obama camp to me, the hesitance was over the language in two of the questions. For example: “If elected, will you within your first term of office increase the nomination of qualified Asian Americans to serve as Article III life-tenured federal judges, such that the number of such judges is proportionate to HALF the number of Asian Americans in the United States?”
The wording, according to the campaign, implied a quota, and Obama is against anything illegal, let alone quotas. So that was the stalemate in the negotiations.
But Woo took it as an arrogant snub, and insists that the Obama camp never suggested alternate wording. He says the fact remains: They just didn’t answer the questionnaire. The tempest grew.
Meanwhile, supporters of Obama were downright nasty in suggesting it was some dirty trick and chided Woo for his questionnaire method. Never mind that it is an effective and direct shorthand method that cuts to the chase. One person called it the “swift boating” of Obama, a reference to the campaign lies lodged against Sen. John Kerry in 2004. I assure you there is no swift boating here, no dirty trickery.
The fact is Obama’s surrogates blew it. They should have found a way to indicate their unwavering support for affirmative action and the positions espoused by 80-20. Then, this would not have become such a point of contention.
A more significant issue is why neither Obama nor Clinton raised any concerns about the black-brown discussion last week in Las Vegas that excluded Asian Americans.
This has been the case in previous “minority” forums and still continues. The fact that we aren’t even seen on the national stage makes the 80-20 questionnaire issue more relevant than many care to admit. Such questionnaires may be the only time our issues are the focus of any candidate’s attention.
But now the campaign moves to California, and it’s readily apparent that this state is beyond the black/white or black/brown paradigms that politicos are comfortable with.
Here they must deal with yellow, and that really was the point about any perceived snub between 80-20 and Obama.
So regard this whole episode as a good precursor to the weeks ahead when the candidates will contest the most populous Asian American state in the country. It assures a lively debate, not among the candidates, but amongst ourselves as to which candidate will best serve our community.
So far, Clinton has a double-digit lead over Obama in some California polls. That may not last. I was surprised by the mixture of support for Obama among a broad age demographic: dreamers all. More on them next week.
emil@amok.com