July 15-21, 2004

city beat

Bush Yearns His ABCs

The Bush administration makes overtures to Pennsylvania's Asian-American population.

by Helen i-lin Hwang

Predicting the Asian-American vote will be pivotal both nationally and locally come November, the Bush campaign recently tapped a local Chinese businessman to focus on those voters in Pennsylvania; next week, he will also be sworn in to a newly appointed commission on Asians that's scheduled to visit Philadelphia.

Of the nearly 170,000 eligible Asian-American voters in Pennsylvania, nearly a third live in Philadelphia, according to Census estimates.

The job of steering those voters toward Bush will fall to Kenneth Wong, a 48-year-old who volunteered to chair the Pennsylvania Asian-American Coalition for the Bush-Cheney campaign.

A lifelong area resident and Bush donor, Wong owns an insurance company, a marketing company and Chinatown Learning Center with his wife. He's also co-chair of the Asian Business Alliance, president of the Philadelphia Dragon Boat Association and active with the Philadelphia Suns, the community basketball league that also performs lion dances around the city.

Wong will also be sworn in to a presidential advisory commission on Asian-American and Pacific Islanders, along with 13 others at the White House on Monday. A day later, the group will visit the United Communities of Southeast Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp., then hold an open town-hall meeting to listen to the Asian community's concerns at the Enterprise Center. (The group will head to each of the panel members' hometowns, visiting successful Asian businesses and holding community meetings to gather information to help advise the president on Asian-American issues.)

Wong says he'll keep a separation of powers between his two Bush jobs.

"The commission is official business. The campaign is campaign stuff," he explains. "We're not supposed to mix the two."

Wong isn't the only organizer working toward the election. S.B. Woo, former lieutenant governor of Delaware and president of the 80-20 Initiative, is also paying close attention. While nonpartisan, his group is committed to delivering bloc votes to the candidate it endorses.

"Philosophy means very little. It's the practical deeds that matter," he explains of how they pick a candidate. "How come the small Cuban vote in Florida is so influential? Because they deliver 100-to-0 bloc votes."

Temple University political science professor Ed Wagner says Asian-Americans tend to vote based on issues and personalities. He cites the example of 30 percent of Asian-Americans voting for Clinton in 1992. Four years later, that number jumped to 43 percent.

A 12- to 13-percentage point "spike" is pretty significant, explains Wagner, and interprets the trend as a signal that Asian-Americans won't necessarily vote along party lines.

Woo knows that whomever the group endorses, that message will reach the 1.1 million people on 80-20's Listserv. (It had 300,000 addresses on its e-mail list before the last presidential election.) As the group readies to cast its endorsement based on promises for the future, Bush is the only one who has not responded to the group's questionnaire for a commitment to equality and justice for Asian-Americans.

Wong's other political role is on the two-year advisory commission, which will be active into the next presidency. The commission is now under the Department of Commerce instead of the Department of Health and Human Services as in the Clinton years, which has instigated criticism from Asian advocacy groups. With its affiliation comes a new mission: to focus on small-business owners within the Asian community. (The previous chairman of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, California professor John Tsu, was a "pioneer," a campaign classification for a major fundraiser who raises more than $100,000 for the Bush re-election campaign, according to the Associated Press.)

"Some critics says we're putting social issues on the back burner," says Wong. He disagrees that social problems won't be taken care of when a strong economic foundation is established.

But for all the candidates' efforts to rally support in the Asian-American community, it seems that even those who've written big checks aren't all that politically active. At least that's the case when it comes to Leon Li, owner of Ocean City Restaurant at Ninth and Vine streets.

"In the restaurant business, we don't really care about politics," Li says. He notes that he'll probably back Bush come November, but says, "I don't want to get too involved."

Though not too keen about taking political sides because he wants both Democrats and Republicans to frequent his restaurant, when asked about being one of the top donors in the city, Li exclaimed, "Oh, that's why I got a photograph of George Bush and Laura."