In the 2008 campaign, the APA community is being recognized as the diverse and politically significant community it has become. APAs have been hired as high-level staffers on major campaigns, and community leaders all the way down to the level of city officials are being courted by the presidential candidates.
Last Tuesday, primary elections were held in Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas and Vermont. Arizona Sen. John McCain won all four primaries and garnered enough delegate votes to be formally crowned the presumptive presidential candidate for the Republicans. President Bush made it official by formally endorsing his ideological rival on Wednesday.
On the Democratic side, the race has been made far more interesting than the Republican side because of proportional representation. Republican winner-take-all voting allowed McCain to crush his rivals, but the net effect is a premature closure that has left many conservative Republicans angry and possibly sidelined in November.
Proportional voting means that when Sen. Hillary Clinton won California by 9 percent of the vote, she won more delegate votes than Sen. Barack Obama, but did not get all of them. Likewise, her wins in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island gave her bragging rights for the day, but her net haul of delegate votes was only about a dozen more than Obama’s. In short, the proportional system is much fairer because a candidate winning 51 percent of the vote gets about 51 percent of the delegates, not 100 percent.
APA vote mobilization for both Obama and Clinton was in high gear in both Ohio and Texas in the last few weeks. The Clinton campaign, which built on the infrastructure of alumni who served in the Bill Clinton administration, had locked up the endorsements of dozens of the highest-ranking APA elected officials months ago.
Led by National APA Director Irene Bueno, a former staffer in the Clinton White House, the Clinton APA team was able to call on Gordon Quan (former Houston City Council member), Jennifer Kim (Austin City Council member), and Hubert Vo, the first Vietnamese American elected to the Texas Legislature. Using the power of appeals to ethnic solidarity, longtime APA community leader Loida Nicolas Lewis flew in to speak with Filipino Americans; former Washington state Gov. Gary Locke spoke to the Chinese American community; and Vo did an hour-long radio show on Vietnamese-language radio asking voters to vote for Clinton.
The Asian American Democrats of Texas were able to host a major debate on Feb. 24 that featured Quan speaking for Clinton and Bob Gee (former U. S. assistant secretary of fossil energy and former chairman of the Texas Public Utility Commission) speaking for Obama (to see videos, go to aadt.us).
The Obama campaign featured events in Texas starring Kansas state legislator Raj Goyle, former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, and celebrities such as Kal Penn, Lisa Ling, Kelly Hu and Kate Walsh. Both campaigns had trainings and literature in Asian languages.
Ohio’s leading APA legislator, Rep. Jay Goyal, chose to remain neutral in the Ohio primary, but Penn appeared at Obama rallies in Cincinnati and Columbus. Meanwhile, five members of the Congressional APA Caucus, Delegate Kumar Barve (majority leader in the Maryland Assembly) and others have lent their support to the Obama cause. On the Clinton side, Junelle Cavero and other leading APA Democratic organizers were on the ground in Ohio mobilizing voters.
Bel Leong-Hong, the API Caucus chair at the Democratic National Committee, said, “This election cycle has been remarkable so far for a number of reasons: the extraordinary voter turnout generally, and the huge number of Asian American and Pacific Islanders turning out to vote as Democrats.”
Gautam Dutta, executive director of the Asian American Action Fund, a Democratic PAC, said: “Election 2008 has shown that the Asian American community is coming of political age. From California to New York to Virginia to Texas, APAs are playing an increasingly active role in politics — and the media have finally begun to notice. AAA-Fund leaders and activists have taken on key leadership roles with the Obama and Clinton campaigns, and we are proud of them all.”
As the campaigns move on to Mississippi, Wyoming and Pennsylvania, the battle for support of APA Democrats continues online at venues such as the Asian American Action Fund Blog (aaa-fund.com), where anyone is free to submit a 500-word essay in support of Clinton or Obama, and the blogs of Asian Pacific Americans for Progress (apaforprogress.org/wordpress/) and APAs for Obama (my.barackobama.com/page/content/aapihome) and Clinton (http://tinyurl.com/yu7t6e).