Asian American Group Seeks to Flex Political Muscle

At a groundbreaking convention Saturday, representatives of Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush lobbied delegates to the 80-20 Initiative, a new Asian American political action committee, to support their party’s presidential candidate.

The three-day convention at the Universal City Hilton, marks the first time an Asian American political group has sought to deliver an Asian American bloc vote to a presidential nominee.

Thirty-three delegates and seven alternates from across the country spent much of Saturday listening to and questioning Democratic and Republican representatives on issues important to Asian Americans. They will announce their presidential endorsement today.

The idea behind 80-20 is to get 80% of Asian Americans to vote as a bloc. Asian Americans comprise 6% of California voters and in the past have tended to split their vote among Democrats, Republicans and independents. The group has an e-mail list of more than than 300,000 supporters.

Even as four mostly young representatives from the Bush and Gore campaigns spoke glowingly of their respective candidates, some of the delegates voiced disappointment that higher-level party leaders did not address them.

“Today is very indicative that we still have a long way to go,” said former Monterey Park Mayor Lily Lee Chen, a delegate to the 80-20 convention. “If we were truly important, higher-level party representatives would have been here.”

Courtni Pugh, the Democratic National Committee’s director of outreach to Asian Pacific Americans, Mona F. Pasquil, director of Community Relations for the Democratic National Convention, and John Chiang, a member of the state Board of Equalization, spoke for the Democrats. Joel Szabat, principal consultant to the California Legislature’s Republican Caucus, represented the Republicans.

Chen, a Democrat, said both parties need to better understand the Asian American community and its complexities, in part, because it is so heavily immigrant.

Former UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, chairman of the session, said that although he was pleased with the speakers, he too, would have preferred to have seen higher-ranking representatives.

Perhaps, next time, when the group is better known and recognized, office seekers will appear in person to seek its endorsement, he said.

Pugh told the gathering that Gore has promised, if elected, to appoint an Asian American to his Cabinet. She said the Clinton administration has tripled the number of Asian Americans appointed by the previous administration, and has nominated more Asian Americans to the federal bench than any other administration.

But when asked by a delegate to give the Asian percentage in all of Clinton’s appointments, she did not have those statistics.

Szabat said that between 4% and 5% of Bush’s appointees were Asian Americans, which is higher than their representation in Texas’ population.

Asked by delegates whether Bush, if elected, intends to appoint an Asian American to his Cabinet, Szabat said the governor’s policy is to appoint “qualified people,” which includes people of all ethnicities.

Though the 80-20 delegates are evenly divided among Democrats, Republicans and Independents, Democratic delegates grilled Szabat--at times with hostile questioning. Some wanted a commitment from Bush that he would appoint an Asian American to his Cabinet. Others accused him of not being responsive to the group’s queries.

That did not sit well with T.M. Yang, an independent delegate from San Francisco.

“I was hoping we wouldn’t attack people so early on,” he said. “Who we endorse is not as important as how we are going to follow up with our endorsement,” said Yang, founding president of the Chinese American Political Assn.

Other issues touched on during Saturday’s spirited exchanges concerned immigration and the case of Wen Ho Lee, the Taiwanese-born nuclear scientist accused of mishandling computer files while he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The convention opened Friday evening with a fund-raiser that drew 700 contributors to a ballroom festooned with red, blue and white balloons and an American flag.

The evening began with the crowd of predominantly first-generation Chinese and Taiwanese American immigrants reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing “America the Beautiful.”

Scripted to reflect a pan-Asian theme, the program included talks about unity among diverse Asian American communities.

“We have to learn sometimes to tolerate differences,” said Tien, who was the evening’s keynote speaker. “But let us vote as one organization--as one unit.”

UCLA political scientist Don T. Nakanishi, who had come to observe the events, said he was impressed by the turnout.

But he also injected a sobering note:

“I think the two major political parties are going to see whether they [80-20] can really deliver,” said Nakanishi, director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center.