Asian Week
By: Phil Tajitsu Nash, Jun 12, 2008
AsianWeek ?The First APA President: The New Gen and The Long Shots
Tags: National |


The second of a three-part series on the prospects of an Asian American presidency
Where will our first Asian Pacific American president come from? Most presidents come through one of three pipelines: the vice presidency, governorships or service as a member of the United States Senate. My guess is that we will see an APA rise up to the governorship of a key state, have him or her be selected as a vice president, and then have him or her run for and win the presidency. Given the number of people in the pipeline, my estimate is that this will happen within the next 20 years, and maybe sooner.
For example, Jay Goyal is a promising Democratic state legislator in Ohio who is already being named to key state committees in his 20s. John Chiang, the current California state controller, is another prospect, as are the state legislators of Asian descent in Texas, New York and Pennsylvania.
Elections are less about individuals than about finding someone who represents the interests of enough voters to propel the ticket to victory. For that reason, the many elected officials from Hawai‘i, which does not have enough electoral votes to swing the presidential election, have less of a chance of being asked onto a presidential ticket.
All of that would change, however, if the rules of the game changed. The campaign for a national popular vote, a fast-growing nationwide movement to circumvent the antiquated Electoral College procedure for electing presidents, would make each vote and each state important.
Having an APA president would be a wonderful development, but until that day happens, we should set our sights on more easily attainable prizes. For example, Seattle-based APA community activists helped a young lawyer named Gary Locke run for a Washington state legislative seat in 1982, and after a stellar career as a legislator, Locke was elected Washington state governor in 1996. In that office, he was able to help the APA community in ways that went far beyond the initial efforts of his community-based supporters.
Norman Mineta, the éminence grise of APA politics and former San Jose mayor, U.S. representative and secretary of both commerce and transportation, could never have achieved the level of success he did had a group of farsighted Issei farmers not decided in the 1940s that they never again wanted to be excluded from the political process. The rest, as we say, is history.