S.B. Woo

‘Somebody’s got to be the fool,” S.B. Woo quipped, explaining his leap from physics professor to politician 15 years ago.

Until 1985, Woo’s main brush with politics had been organizing the faculty union at the University of Delaware, where the Shanghai native began teaching more than three decades ago. Gradually, he realized that if Chinese Americans like himself wanted more political clout, they had to put themselves on the front line of battle. So he ran for Delaware lieutenant governor in 1985 and won a four-year term, becoming the nation’s highest-ranking state officeholder of Chinese ancestry.

Although he later lost a narrow race for the U.S. Senate, Woo did not give up on politics. He remained active nationally as the president of the nonpartisan Organization of Chinese Americans. Then, in 1996, the Democratic Party fund-raising scandal broke: Several Asian donors were linked to improprieties that included trading political contributions for White House access and violating rules against foreign money in U.S. campaigns.

Although the charges centered on a few donors of Chinese ancestry, the controversy tarnished the image of the entire Asian American community. Many Asian Americans began to recoil from political involvement.

Amid this turmoil, Woo proposed a national political-action committee to mobilize an Asian American bloc vote in the 2000 presidential election. “Some people thought it a was very foolish idea,” he said last week on a whirlwind trip to Los Angeles.

But the organization has begun to quiet skeptics. It has 150,000 members in an e-mail network. It raised $100,000 at a San Francisco fund-raiser last Saturday, increasing its warchest to $250,000.

The group, led by Woo, former UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-lin Tien and others, is known as 80-20, shorthand for the margin of Asian American votes it promises to deliver to the candidate or party that commits to its principles of Asian American empowerment. The 80-20 Initiative calls for aggressive federal efforts to combat workplace discrimination and for more Asian Americans in prominent policymaking roles, including a Cabinet seat.

Woo is married and has two children. Casual but polished in a tweed jacket and dark slacks, he spoke about the outlook for the group’s goals during an interview last week. He is not related to the writer.

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Question: How did the 80-20 Initiative come about?

Answer: The direct stimulation was the [1996] fund-raising scandal. . . . The image of our entire community was tarnished by the misdeeds of a few. A small number of organizations and individuals spoke up, but they were not heard. The two political parties were preoccupied with their partisan interests, and the mainstream media didn’t take into consideration how we, the innocent Asian Americans, were feeling. As a community, we didn’t have the numbers nor the unity of voice to protect ourselves. . . .

[The scandal] made a lot of people realize that all those checks count very little: You give the money, they pat you on the head [and] afterward they forget you. . . .

Q: How did you personally react to the fund-raising scandal?

A: At first, you hope it will blow away quickly. Such things happen in a nation and could happen to any individual in any group. . . . The history of America is the history of the immigrant class using the political process to climb up to be middle class. So I felt I could personally be patient, and that Asian Americans, as a group, could be patient as long as we were making steady progress toward equal status. But after so long, to see the political parties, obviously feeling secure, really use us for their own partisan purpose, I felt we were experiencing regression. I don’t think any immigrant group or any U.S. citizen should tolerate that.

I felt my personal responsibility to do something, but if I spoke up myself, who

would pay attention? The only answer is to organize, organize, organize.

Q: How effective have you been?

A: On the Democratic side, Vice President Gore sent us a commitment to our declaration a few hours before a set deadline. On the Republican side, [there have been] organized attacks on 80-20, and the more organized and fierce the attack, the more it reveals respect for 80-20’s effectiveness. Because no one, no organization, ever bothered to attack an entity that’s ineffective.

We openly state we want to establish political clout for the Asian American community, and our analysis is that political clout is based on the ability to deliver two precious political assets: votes andmoney. After [the San Francisco fund-raiser], no one will question our ability to deliver money, and I don’t think people question our ability to deliver votes. We’ve been telling people, “Why not give money to an organization that will make sure that we’ll be remembered afterward?” . . .

Right now, we’ve got 150,000 on our e-mail list, and that’s within a period of 17 months. . . . By the end of this month, we’ll have 200,000. A year from this November, we’ll have a million. Two years from November, we estimate 2.5 million. . . .

Q: Politics is about leverage. When you first started talking to the candidates, trying to get them to respond to the 80-20 principles, what sort of leverage did you have?

A: None. That’s why they ignored us.

Q: Then what happened?

A: [Former Sen. Bill] Bradley was doing a fund-raiser in San Francisco, and tickets weren’t selling as well as expected--because we resisted. We said, “Why not give us a commitment letter?” It came, we negotiated, content was settled and tickets began selling. The faces [his campaign] wanted to have appear during the fund-raiser appeared. That was in August of last year.

We always stated from day one, from the time Bradley endorsed us, that if Gore endorsed us as well, we would become neutral in the Democratic primary and concentrate on the Republican side. But we didn’t want to see Bradley hurt [since he was] the first person who committed to us. So we said to Gore’s people, “We have to respectfully set a deadline: Feb. 15.” On the night of the 14th, [his endorsement came]. It was a very strong letter.

Q: What response have you received from Republicans?

A: We fully expected one of them, either [George W.] Bush or [John] McCain, to try to get the advantage, but they didn’t. So . . . we decided to boycott the Republican Party. Immediately, tons of people wrote in, saying, “I’ve been Republican for so many years and never voted for a Democrat--I’m going to switch.”

Q: How does your membership break down ethnically?

A: I would say it’s about 15% to 20% non-Chinese American. We had to start it somewhere . . . and Chinese Americans are the largest component of the Asian American community. Then we went after the Filipino American community, which is the second-largest component, and we were very successful. . . . We are still courting Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese community leaders.

Q: Has it been difficult to get their participation? The Asian American community is extremely diverse, with differences of language, culture, immigration status and other factors often working against coalition efforts.

A: The key in removing those barriers is to say, yes . . . we are not monolithic, but we do share one common goal: to become first-class citizens. We all know that . . . depends on numbers. As individual communities, our voices have not been heard, but together, we can overcome.

Q: You raised more than $100,000 at the 80-20 fund-raiser in San Francisco. How are you going to use this money?

A: Basically, to do things like get out the vote. Do some voter education, candidate education. Finally, very selectively, we’ll do some voter registration, because that’s an extremely time-consuming, costly, ineffective process. We believe that by moving these folks emotionally, we can get them to go and register themselves. But getting out the vote is something else.

Q: You said you have to appeal to people emotionally. What’s the message that you believe will propel a critical mass of Asian American voters to the polls in November?

A: Liberty and justice for all. Most people have a job. At least they have loved ones with a job. They know Asian Americans’ ability to get an entry-level job is not bad. They are highly educated, have pretty good work ethics. But the ability to rise to the top, that’s something else. For most of us, the higher you’ve risen, the more you know about where the ceiling is. To accept a glass ceiling is to accept second-class citizenship, which Chinese immigrants in Indonesia did to their lasting detriment. This is the kind of message people hear.

Q: Your group wants to deliver 80% of the Asian American vote to one candidate or party that most strongly supports your goals. California, with the largest bloc of Asian American voters, was one of the states you concentrated on. How did they vote in the March primary?

A: A poll was done by the Chinese American Voters Education Committee in San Francisco. Sample size was 108,000, and [it used] Filipino, Chinese, Chinese American, Japanese, Korean [interviewers] speaking the native language. The poll showed that Asian Americans voted 7 to 3 for Gore and Bradley versus Bush and McCain.

Here in Los Angeles, I prefer to believe the Asian Pacific American Legal Center poll, sample size 3,000. It shows two things: One, four years ago, [Asian American] voters identified themselves as . . . 40% Republican, 36% Democrat. This year, in the California primary, it’s 35% Republican, 45% Democrat. A swing of 14 points. Now that’s a heck of a swing. If the Democratic chair in the state of Delaware had polls that showed that there was a 14-point swing [in a constituency], that chair would definitely have to resign.

Q: Historically, Asian Americans have tended to split about 50-50 for either party. So these polls, in your view, show some promising movement, right?

A: We are very encouraged by it. And our momentum will only pick up.

There’s an intangible contribution that we are making to the Asian American community. We are getting our people more and more to believe in themselves, in that we can, within a reasonable amount of time, have a political voice that’s proportionate to our population, provided that we continue to forge unity. That is a message I think will be well accepted in the corners that we can reach.

But when it comes to the general election, it is not the history nor the promises that will count. [Our support will be] judged strictly on the criteria of concrete deeds done by the two parties to help Asian Americans achieve equal opportunity in workplaces. In principle, Bush may not send us a letter, ever, and yet we may endorse him as a candidate, as a Republican nominee, purely because the Republican Party has done more deeds for Asian Americans between Jan. 1 of last year and this coming summer.

So we’ve been telling both parties, “Hurry up, you guys!”

Q: Is the 1996 campaign fund-raising controversy still a cloud over Asian Americans in this election season? How do the two major parties view Asian Americans as supporters?

A: There is a tendency to keep some distance this time, until they [the major parties] realize that they have to call us. Otherwise, they may lose the presidential election.

Q: Does it seem that, despite their long history in this country, Asian Americans are still on the outside looking in?

A: We are still on the outside, and it doesn’t feel good. It reflects a possible loss for the U.S. as a nation. We have roughly a bit more than 10 million [Asian Americans] in the population. To have such a significant fraction of the population, and having made such significant contributions to the nation, whether as Nobel Prize winners or . . . in high technology and higher education, it’s a loss for the nation. *