Reporting
Lou Young
Posted on 11/04/2009 4:38:44 AM PST by ETL
Reporting
Lou Young
NEW YORK (CBS) -- Democrat John Liu has won a decisive victory in the race for New York City Comptroller. The Queens Councilman has made history, becoming the first Asian-American elected to citywide office.
They pretty much knew they were having a victory party at John Liu's headquarters in Midtown. In fact, you could see the optimism on the candidate's face when we caught up with him earlier tonight in Harlem.
Liu was wrapping up his successful campaign for Controller at the side of the man who currently holds the office. And his is a big deal to many.
"He is also an immigrant like me, is not American-born like me, so it's very exciting," said supporter Wing Ma.
Some see his victory as a fitting reflection of national politics in the age of Obama. "I see a parallel, for him to make history," said Henry Singleton.
Liu defeated Republican Joe Mendola, an attorney who has never held political office, 76 percent to 19 percent, along with three other minor party candidates. People were already talking about a possible run for mayor in 2013, but he said he's got another job to do.
"We'll see what happens in four years. If people want me back as comptroller then, I'll run for comptroller," Liu said.
Of course four years is a long way off and no one becomes mayor in this town without a fight, but on Tuesday night, New York's new comptroller-elect is giving off the glow of a political rising star.
Of course this lefty reporter (Lou Young) didn't mention John Liu's communist ties to China and North Korea, nor the ACORN front Working Families Party's endorsement of him. Now the SOB is being considered for mayor of NYC!
In the days and weeks before this election, I had several times posted the following warning on John Liu...
ACORN front group (Working Families Party-WFP) backs ChiCom-linked candidate in today's New York City comptroller runoff
Epoch Times and New York Times
Posted on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 8:19:20 AM by ETL
From the New York Slimes (Times)
Sept 15, 2009...
With 100 percent of the vote counted, unofficial results showed that Mr. Liu had captured 38 percent of the vote, just short of the 40 percent he needed to win outright. Mr. Yassky took 30 percent, and Councilwoman Melinda R. Katz of Queens finished third, with 20 percent. David I. Weprin, a councilman from Queens, was fourth.
The results set up a contest between two men who, over the course of the campaign, projected sharply different images to voters. Mr. Liu, a former actuary and an immigrant from Taiwan, struck a populist tone, from his home neighborhood of Flushing to Chinatown, where voters embraced him as a trailblazer, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where several black leaders endorsed him.
Mr. Liu, who ran with the backing of several major labor unions, would become the first Asian American elected citywide if he prevails in a runoff on Sept. 29.
At a rally on Tuesday night, Mr. Liu said, “This campaign has been about making history, but it has also been about putting New York City back on track.”
New York Times, Sept 15, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/nyregion/16comptroller.html?_r=1
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Protesters hold eye-catching boards that condemn city Comptroller candidate John Liu. (Helena Zhu/The Epoch Times)
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/22038/
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http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/22292/
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New York City Candidates Linked to Chinese, North Korean Regimes
Matthew Robertson & Matt Gnaizda
Epoch Times Staff & NTDTV Staff
Sep 13, 2009
NEW YORK—At a rally on the steps of City Hall last week, New York residents expressed concern that two New York City political candidates—John Liu and John Choe—have connections with communist regimes.
John Liu has been a city council member representing New York’s Flushing area since 2001. This year, he is running for city Comptroller—the position that oversees the city’s finances, including its $60 billion budget.
Spokesman for the Christian Democracy Party of China, David Lu, says John Liu appears to be cultivating a relationship with the Chinese consulate.
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/22437/
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China's United Front and John Liu's Connections
By Charlotte Cuthbertson
Epoch Times Staff
NEW YORK—As residents in New York gear up for the local elections, an unseen force may be hard at work.
City Comptroller candidate John Liu has a friendly relationship with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organizations and former Canadian diplomat Brian McAdam says New Yorkers should be concerned.
“Wherever there is a Chinese community, the [Chinese Communist Party] CCP is going to try and infiltrate, if they haven't done so already,” McAdam said.
City Councilman John Liu is vying for the New York City comptroller job, with the primary elections on Sept. 15..."
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/22243/
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Again from the New York Slimes (Times)...
(of course no mention of John Liu's communist connections or that the "Working Families Party" is a Marxist front group for ACORN)
Young and Active, the Working Families Party Shows Muscle in the Primaries
NEW YORK TIMES, September 16, 2009
JULIE BOSMAN and KAREEM FAHIM
Much to the chagrin of candidates like Mr. Gioia, the still relatively little-known 10-year-old party [Working Families Party] had dispatched a small army in the weeks before the primary, selling voters on its candidates in the mayoral, City Council, public advocate and comptroller races.
Organizers knocked on 227,928 doors and talked to 62,112 voters, a party official said. On Tuesday, more than 350 workers were stationed throughout the city, most working for a day rate of $100.
Their efforts resulted in the party’s best electoral showing yet. In the public advocate’s race, the Working Families endorsed Bill de Blasio, a city councilman from Brooklyn. Coming from behind, he forced Mark Green into a runoff on Sept. 29, even though Mr. Green was the presumed front-runner based on pre-election polls and had already held the position.
In the comptroller’s race, the [Working Families Party] party backed John C. Liu, a councilman from Queens, who won 38 percent of the vote..."
Young and Active, the Working Families Party Shows Muscle in the Primaries:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/nyregion/17working.html?_r=2&ref=nyregion
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From David Horowitz's
FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org
PROFILE: WORKING FAMILIES PARTY
* Front group for ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now)
* Functions as a political party in New York State and Connecticut, running or cross-endorsing candidates for local, state, and federal office
An outgrowth of the socialist New Party, [Working Families Party] WFP was created in 1998. According to a 2000 article by the Associated Press, its objective was (and still is) to "help push the Democratic Party toward the left." In pursuit of this goal, WFP runs radical candidates in state and local elections. Generally, WFP candidates conceal their extremism beneath a veneer of populist rhetoric, promoting bread-and-butter issues designed to appeal to union workers and other blue-collar voters, Republican and Democrat alike.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6965
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PROFILE: NEW PARTY (NP)
* Marxist political coalition
* Was active from 1992-1998
* Endorsed Barack Obama for Illinois state senate seat in 1996
Co-founded in 1992 by Daniel Cantor (a former staffer for Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign) and Joel Rogers (a sociology and law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), the New Party was a Marxist political coalition whose objective was to endorse and elect leftist public officials -- most often Democrats. The New Party's short-term objective was to move the Democratic Party leftward, thereby setting the stage for the eventual rise of new Marxist third party.
Most New Party members hailed from the Democratic Socialists of America and the militant organization ACORN. The party's Chicago chapter also included a large contingent from the Committees of Correspondence, a Marxist coalition of former Maoists, Trotskyists, and Communist Party USA members.
The New Party's modus operandi included the political strategy of "electoral fusion," where it would nominate, for various political offices, candidates from other parties (usually Democrats), thereby enabling each of those candidates to occupy more than one ballot line in the voting booth. By so doing, the New Party often was able to influence candidates' platforms. (Fusion of this type is permitted in seven states -- Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Mississippi, New York, South Carolina, and Vermont -- but is common only in New York.)
Though Illinois was not one of the states that permitted electoral fusion, in 1995 Barack Obama nonetheless sought the New Party's endorsement for his 1996 state senate run. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement, and he used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers.
In 1996, three of the four candidates endorsed by the New Party won their electoral primaries. The three victors included Barack Obama (in the 13th State Senate District), Danny Davis (in the 7th Congressional District), and Patricia Martin, who won the race for Judge in the 7th Subcircuit Court. All four candidates attended an April 11, 1996 New Party membership meeting to express their gratitude for the party's support.
The New Party's various chapters similarly helped to elect dozens of other political candidates in a host of American cities.
One of the more notable New Party members was Carl Davidson, a Chicago-based Marxist who became a political supporter of Barack Obama in the mid-1990s.
In 1997 the New Party's influence declined precipitously after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that electoral fusion was not protected by the First Amendment's freedom of association clause. By 1998 the party was essentially defunct. Daniel Canto and other key party members went on to establish a new organization with similar ideals, the Working Families Party of New York.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7434
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Obama - file 41: Obama Was a New Party Member-Documentary Evidence
By Trevor Loudon October 23, 2008
http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/10/obama-file-41-obama-was-new-party.html
Communist Ties Become Issue in NYC Politics
William F. Jasper August 6, 2009
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/politics/1593
And here...
Lobbyists for Communist N. Korea & China Worming Way into Big Apple Politics
William F. Jasper, August 5, 2009
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/politics/1592
source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Liu#Political_career
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That's "ex"-Black Panther Charles Barron in the Mao suit standing beside John Liu.
Charles Barron: "My immediate response is 'take off the ex,' because I’m still a Panther at heart. And I’m proud to be a Panther because the Black Panther Party fed children breakfast. It had a clothing drive for struggling people in our communities. It led the research drive around sickle cell anemia, a rare blood disease peculiar to black people. As far as the guns and the actions with the police, that wasn’t even a major part of our program. That was for self-defense against police brutality."
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2003/06/local/barron
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From the Maoist Internationist Movement:
[1960s/original] Black Panther Party [BPP] Archives (newspaper collection)
From the article: REVOLUTIONARY HEROES
"On May 1st, May Day [1969], the day of the gigantic Free Huey rally, two of Alioto's top executioners vamped on the brothers from the Brown Community who were attending to their own affairs. These brothers, who are endowed with the revolutionary spirit of the Black Panther Party defended themselves from the racist pig gestapo.
Pig Joseph Brodnik received his just reward with a big hole in the chest. Pig Paul McGoran got his in the mouth which was not quite enough to off him.
The revolutionary brothers escaped the huge swarm of pigs with dogs, mace, tanks and helicopters, proving once again that "the spirit of the people is greater than the man's technology."
To these brothers the revolutionary people of racist America want to say, by your revolutionary deed you are heroes, and that you are always welcome to our camp."
Source: Maoist Internationist Movement
Article: REVOLUTIONARY HEROS (May 11, 1969):
http://web.archive.org/web/20060717050055/http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bpp/index.html
New York City Faces Dangerous Choice in General Election
Voters need to know the real reasons behind City Councilman Liu’s success
By Stephen Gregory
Epoch Times Staff
NEW YORK CITY—New York City has an election next week and, however cynical many of the city’s voters may have become about politicians, one candidate should shock them.
John Liu is the Democratic Party candidate for Comptroller, the city’s top financial officer. Voters might have doubts about Liu because of his shaky hold on the truth or his too close relations with unions, but they may not know even more serious reasons for concern.
The New York Daily News reported that Liu had failed to refund campaign contributions to those he had helped steer public money to in his role as a New York City Council member—refunds he had promised to make.
The Epoch Times reported other funny business with Liu’s campaign financing. Individuals listed as donors said they didn’t give the amounts Liu said they did, and the records for at least 140 of the contributors were missing the identifying information required by law.
The New York Daily News also reported on the lie that was told in one of Liu’s campaign ads—that he had worked in a sweatshop as a child. But according to his own mother, he didn’t work in a sweatshop.
Voters might also have doubts about Liu when they realize that, with him in the comptroller’s office, the public employee unions might be deciding what would be done with the New York City pension fund.
That is the view of the New York Post in an editorial: “Big Labor may be about to score a huge—and dangerous—victory by installing its puppet, Queens Councilman John Liu, in the enormously powerful job of city comptroller.
“Heaven help New York if it works.”
Forming an alliance with big labor in the Working Families Party (WFP) is the discredited group ACORN.
The Post warns of the ACORN connection: “Liu wants to use the [pension] fund to invest in ‘affordable housing’—a field dominated by scandal-scarred housing giant ACORN, which is bolstered by unions and joined at the hip to the WFP.”
New York’s voters might have reason to worry that a union-controlled pension fund will involve the city in deals its taxpayers can never afford.
But in concentrating on Liu being in bed with the unions, the Post misses the really big story of influence in Liu’s political career.
The Chinese Communist Party’s campaign for Liu has been unseen while in plain view.
Liu has shown himself to be quite willing to show gratitude for the CCP’s sponsorship.
When the Chinese military successfully launched a spacecraft in 2003, Council Member Liu immediately went to the Chinese Consulate in New York to present a proclamation.
In March 2008, when CNN’s Jack Cafferty, in response to the brutal repression in Tibet, called the leaders of the CCP “a bunch of goons and thugs,” Liu helped organize a rally protesting Cafferty in New York’s Foley Park.
When the CCP helped instigate attacks on Falun Gong practitioners in Flushing, New York, in the spring and summer of 2008, Liu supported and encouraged those who attacked the practitioners.
Once the unions and ACORN are paid off for their work in helping Liu get elected, what will his focus be? When investment decisions are made about New York City’s $85 billion pension fund, will he be looking out for the interests of the people of New York or his patrons in the CCP?
Liu won the primary with a little over 126,000 votes, out of a New York City population of 8.4 million. Will 1.5 percent of New Yorkers put a communist stooge in office, or, if Liu’s story becomes known, will the people of New York make a wiser choice?
Words cannot begin to describe where we seem to be headed...
Lovely NY, lovely.
In better news Republicans gained a couple NYC council seats in Queens. Including the one of this commie rat who just elected Comptroller.
But Tom Ognibene who left his council seat in 2005 to run as the Conservative against Bloomberg again failed to win his old seat back.
I think the GOP has 5 seats now.
More lousy news I didn’t remember maybe you guys did that the ancient DA of Manhattan (took office right after Dewey left, ok a little after that ;) ) is retiring. His replacement is Cyrus Vance Jr. Carter’s SOS’s son. Blech.
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China under Communist rule and Mao's 1949 revolution, the Chinese will hold a military parade in Beijing on Thursday of unparalleled size -- 5,000 soldiers, 43,000 fireworks and a display of 52 new weapons -- followed by a civilian parade of 100,000 marchers and 60 floats, many chanting new nationalistic mantras coined by the Chinese government for the occasion.
For a nation that worships Mao, and the path of development and prosperity the Chinese people believe he charted, nothing less would do to commemorate its 60th anniversary.
But when it comes to the commemoration of China's 60th anniversary in the U.S., perhaps we could -- and should -- expect a little less.
Wednesday night in New York City, the Empire State Building will illumine its familiar spire with red and yellow lights in honor of Communist China. The Communism-themed color scheme will stay lit through Thursday night, much to the delight of China's consular officials, who were on hand for a ceremony in the lobby of the iconic building Wednesday morning, and to the acute dismay of the dozen or so protesters outside, and to many Americans who question whether honoring China's Communist revolution here is at all appropriate.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-flumenbaum/empire-state-building-goe_b_305122.html
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Empire State Building Goes Red for Communist China, Sparking Protest
September 30, 2009
Sept. 30: The Empire State Building lit in red and yellow to honor the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
NEW YORK — New York is seeing red over the decision to turn the city's highest beacon — and one of America's symbols for free enterprise — into a shining monument honoring China's communist revolution Wednesday night.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,557823,00.html?mep
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Mao Tse-Tung
AKA Chairman Mao, AKA 'The Great Helmsman'. (Tse-Tung can also be spelt Zedong. Translated the name means 'To Shine on the East'.)
Country: China
Kill tally: 14 to 20 million deaths from starvation during the 'Great Leap Forward'. Tens of thousands killed and millions of lives ruined during the 'Cultural Revolution'.
Did you see the results in Long Island? Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi, the Democrat that was so highly touted that he actually had gubernatorial aspirations, only received 48.1% and is clinging to a 237-vote lead over Republican challenger Edward Mangano (who got 48.0%); had Mangano won the Conservative Party endorsement, we would have picked up the seat (the Conservative Party candidate got 3.9%) without having to wait for absentee ballots and recounts and such.
For Nassau Comptroller, Republican George Maragos got 50.1% over incumbent Democrat Howard Weitzman, and has a 576-vote lead with all precincts in. Expect a recount.
The GOP also reclaimed a majority in the Nassau County Legislature, with Republican Howard Kopel defeating incumbent Democrat Jeffrey Toback by 9%. The GOP may also be able to pad its new majority due to the fact that Republican Joseph Belesi appears to have defeated incumbent Democrat David Mejias (who was often mentioned as a potential candidate against Peter King) by 28 votes.
http://elections.nytimes.com/2009/results/long-island.html
All told, quite an impressive showing in Nassau County. I hope this bodes well for regaining a couple of the state senate seats that the GOP lost in 2007 and 2008.
Peter Koo won Liu’s old district, CD-20, which is centered on Flushing and majority Asian (about 40-50% Chinese, and 20% Korean, although there are much more of the latter in the district won by Halloran just to the east).
I was pleased about the results in Nassau County, as I truly believed that my home county was forever lost to the Dems. My only fear is that these new folks will be “Gulotta Republicans” and beholden to the public sector unions (especially the PBA)/NEA/AFT. There isn’t much that they can do about property taxes, as those are largely past at the “Town” level (towns on LI being agglomerations of villages and unincorporated areas).
"The attacks went the other way, too. A Queens newspaper that is partially owned by Mr. Ackerman published a cover article about Mr. Halloran’s religious beliefs. He is an adherent of Theodism, a neo-pagan faith that attempts to reconstruct the pre-Christian tribal religions of the European Germanic people. (Mr. Kim did not explicitly make an issue of Mr. Halloran’s religious beliefs.)"
Given the nature of Liu’s City Council district (50% Chinese), I suspect he had little choice but to cosy up to the Chinese government. Money alone isn’t going to get him to Gracie Manson, though. Bloomberg spent over $100m, 14x what his opponent did, to get a 4% margin of victory. Besides, the list of NYC Comptrollers becoming mayor is not a long one.
From the Spring of 1991...
The Resistible Rise of Margaret Chin
Richard Brookhiser
Margaret Chin’s fund-raising dinner seemed like a generic American campaign event: the banner on the wall behind the lectern; the rows of neat place settings, 500 in all; the table out front staffed by brisk workers collecting money and names. Since, however, the restaurant was Chinese, the chicken would not be rubber, the only evident deviation from the norm.
One wonders, however, how much the Patrons (at $100 a head) and Friends ($35) assembled last fall knew about the 37-year-old former Democratic state committeewoman they were patronizing. For Ms. Chin had risen to prominence by way of the Communist Workers Party, a Maoist sect that decided several years ago to begin infiltrating mainstream politics.
The Communist Workers Party got its start in the early Seventies as the Workers Viewpoint Organization, drawing its membership largely from Chinese-American students at City College. It declared its “guiding ideology” to be “Marxism/ Leninism/Mao Tse-Tung thought.” Its publications mourned the death of Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev and hailed the economic policies of Pol Pot. It rejected Deng Xiaoping for being too soft on the West and capitalism, and embraced the Gang of Four.
In 1979, the party briefly burst into the national limelight when it decided to seek a direct confrontation with its counterparts on the bug-head Right. Party members in North Carolina began by breaking up a Ku Klux Klan-sponsored screening of the D. W. Griffith film, “The Birth of a Nation,” in the town of China Grove. Emboldened by this success, the party announced a “Death to the Klan” rally in Greensboro, daring local Klansmen and Nazis to show up.
Unfortunately, they did. Both sides were armed. The shoot-out that resulted on November 3, 1979, was a lopsided one, and five Communist Workers Party members were killed. Two party members held a press conference in New York to denounce the killings, and got their picture in the New York Times. One of them was Margaret Chin.
After this setback, the Party did not turn against violence; it just decided to pick on less dangerous opponents.
In August 1980, the Democratic Party provided a ripe target by holding its quadrennial convention in New York. During the convention, 150 CWPers stormed a Democratic fund-raiser at the Plaza Hotel, injuring six cops. The next evening a contingent of 200, armed with pick handles and Mace, tried to fight their way into Madison Square Garden, the convention site; 15 were arrested.
In the meantime, the CWP was acquiring a local power base in Chinatown, in the form of a community group calling itself Asian-Americans for Equality. The latter does not avow its connection with the CWP, but for years the two groups shared an office and phone number, and CWP veterans had a way of turning up as Asian-Americans for Equality leaders, notably in the form of its president from 1982 to 1986: Margaret Chin.
Asian-Americans for Equality resembles a familiar type of New York activist group, collecting grievances and brokering deals. In 1985 it made the news when it, charged that federal regulators had committed a “racist” act in closing the Golden Pacific National Bank. When the Chinese-language press raised questions about possible links between Asian-Americans for Equality (AAFE) and the bank’s owner, reporters from five of the papers received threats.
As time went on, the CWP began casting a wishful eye at mainstream electoral politics. An early sign of attitude adjustment came in 1984 when the party endorsed Jesse Jackson for president, though its publications still denounced the civil rights leader as an “infamous careerist.” A year later, it was ready for a metamorphosis.
At a convention in mid-1985, the CWP formally dissolved itself, in its place arose a new organization, the New Democratic Movement, devoted to establishing “local power bases.” Jerry Tung, general secretary of the former CWP, explained the idea to the assembled faithful. “[O]nce you get people elected or appointed to office, you can award contracts to friends.... When you can raise money for political purposes, when you do it in the right place in the right atmosphere, and look right, and the [mainstream] party bosses are there, then that money makes them take you seriously.” The meeting closed with a rousing chorus of the “Internationale,” for auld lang syne.
It would not seem easy for a left-wing sectlet to build a serious power base in Chinatown, then as now one of the most politically conservative neighborhoods in New York City. Instead, the CWP alumni played what can in retrospect be seen as a brilliant crosstown gambit. The Village Independent Democrats, the venerable liberal club, had fallen on hard times. Money, as Mr. Tung so justly put it, makes politicians take you seriously, and as former CWP members flooded into the Village Independent Democrats they brought cash and credit to help it wage its political battles.
The entry did not go unresisted. Opponents in the Village found a prominent outside voice in Illinois Democrat Adlai Stevenson III. Stevenson had come to national attention as a victim of a bizarre run-in with cult politics: While he was winning his state’s Democratic nomination for governor in 1986, two followers of Lyndon LaRouche were managing to get on the ticket as his running mates in the same primary. Stevenson felt himself obliged to renounce the Democratic nomination and run as an independent. He lost.
After losing, Stevenson had plenty of time to reflect op the havoc that cults can wreak in mainstream politics. In 1987 he wrote an open letter to Village Democrats, urging them to reject the local district leader candidates of the Village Independent Democrats, which had chosen to make common cause with “CWP-style extremism.” An outraged New York City political establishment mobilized, like antibodies, to expel the alien intruder: in this case not the CWPers, but Adlai Stevenson. The Village Independent Democrats sent out a response charging Stevenson with “red-baiting” and “resuscitat[ing] the work of Joe McCarthy.”
The letter was signed by such eminences as Congressman Ted Weiss, since-indicted State Senate Minority Leader Manfred Ohrenstein, City Council member (now Manhattan Borough President) Ruth Messinger, and Manhattan Borough President (now Mayor) David Dinkins.
Asian-Americans for Equality (AAFE) began to go big time. Its annual banquets in Chinatown garnered greetings from not only an array of Democratic officeholders, but also such Republicans as Senator Alfonse D’Amato and Representative Bill Green. Since the mid-Eighties, AAFE has taken in more than $2 million in grants from the State Department of Social Services and Division of Housing and Community Renewal and from the Lower East Side Area Policy Board, a funnel for federal monies.
Ms. Chin’s rise in the world tracked AAFE’s. In 1986, backed by the Village Independent Democrats, she won election to the Democratic state committee from the 61st Assembly District. Since her reelection in 1988, she has graced official women’s committees for David Dinkins, Mario Cuomo, and Robert Abrams, and Asian-American committees for Carol Bellamy and Deborah Glick. Now she hopes to win a seat in the expanded 51-seat City Council, whose smaller districts were in fact intended to allow for more representation of the city’s ethnic enclaves. Chin hopes to run in a lower Manhattan district encompassing all of Chinatown, with the politically active Hispanics of the Lower East Side assigned to another district. A victory would make her, as her campaign leaflets proclaim, “the first Asian-American council member in New York City history.”
Extremists around the country regularly try to enter mainstream politics, but elsewhere the major parties usually make an effort to stop them. Not so in this case. The lack of opposition to Ms. Chin is symptomatic of the way the city’s flaccid one-party political culture works, or rather doesn’t. New York not only lacks a sense of political hygiene, but makes it a point of honor to lack it. What else can explain the aching slowness with which both the campaign and the administration of Mayor Dinkins have distanced themselves from Sonny Carson, the racist crackpot behind the boycott of Korean fruit stores in Flatbush?
Opposition among Ms. Chin’s potential constituents has been relatively slow to organize. I spoke to a number of Chinese-American journalists and political figures who privately shuddered at her politics, but not one was willing to be quoted by name. Some thought it quite possible that she would be elected. The feeling seemed to be that the overwhelming wish of Chinatown residents is not to incur the wrath of the city’s political elite, and that the way to avoid rocking the boat might be to accept the proconsul designated for their representation, someone who has shown that she has what it takes to work closely with those who govern New York.
Which suggests a wider problem for city politics. The larger culture is content to buy Asians’ vegetables, ride Asians’ taxis, and nod from time to time toward the crucial role that Asians play in the city’s economic vitality. But of Asians’ opinions or political aspirations it knows nothing. One may hope that this changes as Asians emerge as the coming minority of the 1990s, with Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and others joining the Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese who are already here in numbers.
In the meantime, however, the result of the general inattention is to make it all too easy for a fringe group to establish itself as ethnic representative by way of its clout in the wider political arena, as Asian-Americans for Equality seems to be doing with its Village-to-Chinatown carom shot. It would be ironic if the residents of Chinatown, many of whom braved great perils to flee the tyranny created by Mao Tse-Tung, were to find themselves officially represented by one of Mao’s last disciples.
Ouch, heartbreaking close loss if Suozzi pulls it out. I’m surprised the GOP took the county council. That’s excellent. The rat exec of Westchester county lost. Local rats in NYC burbs losing popularity? It’s about time for the voters to start getting fatigued with them.
Also it’s great to see the GOP city council candidates in Queens win Asian voters.
Ping.
I wonder why Edward Mangano, the GOP candidate for Nassau County Executive, failed to get the Conservative Party endorsement. If Mangano was an acceptable candidate, the CP really screwed up in this race; if he is a RINO, then the GOP primary voters screwed up by nominating someone that they knew would not get the CP endorsement and thus would have a big handicap in the general election.
On Tuesday, I noticed we lost the White Plains (Westchester Co.) Mayorship when the incumbent Republican retired. I didn’t catch the margin of victory for the Democrat (although one challenger, couldn’t tell if it was the Republican, had mounted a write-in bid). But the more galling loss, which reminded me of NY-23, was in Syracuse. The Dem incumbent, Matt Driscoll, retired and another Dem, Stephanie Miner, succeeded him with right about the 50% mark — she had two opponents, the Republican (39%) and the Conservative (10%). Had we unified around one, we might’ve taken that office (we held it prior to Driscoll in 2001).
Either possibility is a good one. One of the parties screwed up.
Good article on the Westchester Exec race were the RINO loved rat lost.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWFlYjk4ZDdlZmQxNjQ4NTAzNTY2YThjZDU3Y2E4NGQ=
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