Fong Helps Redraw US Ethnic Political Map Eric Ellis

San Francisco

10/28/1998

As he stands beaming before the gates of Chinatown on Grant Street in the heart of San Francisco, Matt Fong is a man Bill Clinton would be proud of. Successful, proudly American and comfortable with his ethnic roots and running for the US Senate in the November 3 mid-term elections, Fong, a fourth-generation Chinese-American, epitomises much of what Americans find warm and fuzzy about their country.

And there's a further bonus for Clinton: Fong's impeccable Democrat pedigree. Fong's feisty mother, Fong Eu, is a veteran Democrat who served for 20 years as Secretary of State for California, the US's most-Asian of States. And wasn't it Asian money that controversially flowed into Democrat coffers to finance the Clinton-Gore re-election in 1996?

But wait a moment - those are Republican banners framing Fong. And the Chinese community urging him on. Aren't ethnic minorities in the US supposed to be staunch Democrats?

That's true of African-Americans and Latinos but less so of Chinese.

The presence of California's well-regarded former State treasurer, Matt Fong, in the race for a Californian Senate slot in Washington is redrawing the ethnic political map in the US.

California hosts about 30 per cent of US immigrants each year and has twice the number of Asian- Americans as any other State.

In Silicon Valley, in real-estate development, retailing and increasingly in Hollywood, Asian-American arrivals generally achieve quick success and vault to the top or near-top of the socio-economic scale.

With Fong and Democrat incumbent Barbara Boxer see-sawing for opinion-poll favouritism, California's 700,000-strong Asian-American community has become a force to court and will play a major role in deciding one of America's closest races next week.

The GOP desperately want Fong in the Senate. A Fong victory would give the Republicans a filibuster-proof 60 members in the Senate, as well as knock out one of Bill Clinton's most eloquent liberal supporters.

Asian-Americans make up about 5 per cent of eligible voters but Fong reckons that come November 3 they will comprise 10 per cent of the California vote.

The latest opinion polls show Fong trailing Boxer by five points, after Boxer shifted her campaign into the Asian communities by stressing her support for Asian-American judicial appointments and close ties to popular local supervisors. Boxer got 52 per cent of the Asian-American vote when she won the 1992 Senate race.

But Fong has made a huge effort to coax Asian-American voters, running TV advertisements in Mandarin and Cantonese to tap into the State's burgeoning Chinese community, particularly in San Francisco, host to the US largest group of Chinese.

"For Asian-Americans, the path to the middle class has not been through government or politics," Fong said recently.

"A focus on economic achievement and education came first, and only now are Asian-Americans beginning to have real political currency."

San Francisco's politics are different. In a melting-pot nation, the city more closely resembles the multiculturalism of Australia or Canada.

When asked recently by The Australian Financial Review to identify San Francisco's establishment, the power centres he networks to win office, Mayor Willie Brown identified three: the labour movement, the gay community and the Chinese community.

"The Chinese here are hugely influential," says Brown, who regularly visits China, Hong Kong and Taiwan to drum up support.

"The mix here is unlike any other place in the US."

While Fong could never admit that Chinese will vote for him because he is ethnic Chinese and not because he is a Republican, others are less convinced.

"It's a population in the making, in a political sense," says Paul Ong of the Lewis Centre for Regional Policy Studies at UCLA.

"It's very unlike other minority groups. There is no strong party affiliation, and even when there is, party affiliation does not predict voting patterns."

If Democrats thought that they had the Asian-American community in the bag, they were wrong, as the many Fong posters that paper San Francisco's Chinatown seems to suggest.

The Donorgate campaign funding scandals did not play well among Asian-Americans, many of whom perceived real or imagined slights of racism in the scandals sub-text.

Overwhelmingly under- represented in Washington, Asian-Americans considered themselves powerless to fight back. Now Fong can provide a voice and is working that theme for all its worth.

"It's a backlash against both parties' attacks on Asian-Americans and their rights as citizens," he says.

Interestingly, Asian-Americans are presumed to side with other ethnic minorities on defining issues such as affirmative action and immigration controls.

A June proposition to dismantle California's (mostly Spanish) bilingual education system was overwhelmingly opposed by Chinatown, which in turn backed Fong in the Senate party primary 65-35 despite Fong's supporting the proposition.

Asians have succeeded in the US without a government-backed leg-up like affirmative action, differing from other minorities. This has been overlooked in analysing the strong support for Fong.

At the end of the day, in a community that their cousins in Beijing like to say has 5,000 years of history, Fong's venerable old mother neatly typifies the conventional wisdom that blood ties run thicker than political ones.

A life-long Democrat, Fong Eu is cranky at the way Asian- Americans were treated during the Donorgate scandals and wants her son "in the corridors of US power". Party history doesn't matter.