80-20

NEWARK, Del. - S.B. Woo is a professor of molecular and atomic physics at the University of Delaware. He has a small office at the university's Sharp Lab, an iMac computer, a growing e-mail list of 165,000 Asian-Americans, and a plan to transform their vote from a "loose pile of sand" into something more cohesive and formidable.

If physics is the science of matter, energy, motion and force, Woo's formula is to energize an Asian-American electorate that has tended to be a diffident and divided presence on the national political landscape into a bloc vote to be feared and fought over, to become a force that matters.

Woo is no political neophyte. He is a former Democratic lieutenant governor and U.S. Senate nominee in Delaware. But those singular achievements are dwarfed by the audacity of his new ambition to bring together into a self-conscious community of self-interest a disparate people united mostly by the continent in which they or their ancestors once lived, and the inability of some other Americans to correctly tell them apart.

It is an ambition made all the more brazen by its intention to accomplish this feat almost entirely in cyberspace through a virtual political action committee known as the 80-20 Initiative that Woo and others originally launched in 1998 as a civic committee.

Succeed or fail, the 80-20 Initiative is a watershed event in the histories of both Asian-American politics and cyberdemocracy, and it is not surprising that America's most wired racial minority should look to the Internet as its most promising organizing arena. It certainly makes it possible for a physics professor in Delaware to play a serious national role in a movement that hopes to have its most important impact in California.

Sometime this summer, the 80-20 endorsement committee will choose between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush for president, based on an evaluation of how much their respective parties have done for Asian-Americans since the beginning of last year.

Between summer and November, by which time they hope to have 300,000 e-mail addresses, the 80-20 leadership will do all it can to persuade Asian-American voters - especially in California where they can wield the most influence - to ignore their usual predilections and give 80-20's chosen candidate 80 percent of the Asian-American vote - thus the name "80-20." In addition to their e-mail list, they have collected $150,000 on the Internet, and another $100,000 at a dinner in April in San Francisco.

So far, the effort has achieved both respectful and appreciative attention in the Asian-American community and deep skepticism about its prospects.

"We certainly appreciate these kinds of coalition-building efforts," said Pei-te Lien, a political scientist at the University of Utah who is writing her second book on Asian-American politics.

But, she said, "The Asian-American community, there is not really now much community. There are so many barriers and so few histories of success."

At Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, political scientist Taeku Lee agrees that it is a laudable effort, though perhaps ahead of its time. "It puts bloc voting ahead of the development of group interests," said Lee.

Asians are now 4 percent of the U.S. population. They are a majority in Hawaii and 12 percent of the population in California. But in only three other states - Washington, New York and New Jersey - are they more than 5 percent of the population.

They are in some ways well poised to be a swing vote. According to Don Nakanishi, director of the Asian-American Studies Center at UCLA, Asian registration breaks down to roughly a third Democratic, a third Republican and a third independent. The independent proportion is leagues larger than in the general population.

Asian-Americans tend to split their vote pretty evenly, occasionally swinging mildly one way or the other, especially if a co-ethnic candidate is in the race. Asian-Americans nationally commonly cross party lines to contribute to the campaigns of other Asian-Americans, whether it is Democrats such as S.B. Woo and Gov. Gary Locke or Matt Fong, the Republican candidate for Senate in California in 1998.

In addition to Locke, Asian-American politicians can draw voters across ethnic and class boundaries to win. Former Seattle city council member Martha Choe is head of the state's Department of Trade and Economic Development and has been mentioned as a potential candidate for Congress. In Oregon, Democratic Rep. David Wu, the only Chinese-American member of Congress, represents the high-tech areas of Portland. Wu voted against permanent normal trade status with China this week. Only a handful of Asian-Americans have served in Congress - notably long-time Rep. Robert Masui of Sacramento, Sen. Daniel Inouye and Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii. Rising numbers of Asian-Americans should mean a greater chance of more elected officials from the community.

But their vote is far smaller than their total population. Two-thirds of Asian-Americans are foreign-born. Many are not yet citizens. Of the more than 10 million Asian-Americans, Nakanishi estimates that between 1.5 million and 1.7 million are registered. While Asians are 12 percent of the population in California, they represent between 4 percent and 8 percent of the electorate. The different nationalities are also on different political wavelengths - Japanese and Filipinos tend to be much more Democratic, Koreans and Southeast Asians more Republican.

Despite its pan-Asian ambitions, 80-20 retains a heavily Chinese-American cast. The Filipino, Pakistani and Indian communities are represented on its steering committee, but so far the Japanese, Korean and Southeast Asian communities are not.

And yet, despite this failing, 80-20 taps the palpable yearning among many Asian-American leaders and citizens to be players in a system built on a history of racial and ethnic politics.

Frank Wu, a law professor at Howard University and a frequent writer on Asian-American politics, said 80-20 may help Asian-Americans overcome a somewhat deserved image of apathy.

"The 80-20 effort is the first of its kind - it's bipartisan, it's national and I think it's quite commendable," said Wu. It also fits a community that, according to a federal study last year, is by far the most likely to be online. "The more high-tech the democratic process becomes," said Wu, "the better off Asian-Americans will be."

But, said Wu, "They're not going to tell me how to vote" and "I don't anticipate 80-20 or any other group will be able to organize and deliver a cohesive Asian-American bloc vote. There is no single issue that unites Asian-Americans. We have multiple languages, multiple histories, multiple agendas."

Black Americans share the history of slavery and its aftermath. Hispanics share a language. Jews - whom Woo particularly holds up as a model of the strategic deployment of their even smaller numbers - are, of course, Jewish. But consider the historical antipathy of Japanese and Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese, Indians and Pakistanis. And does a Pakistani have anything more in common with a Korean than either has with a Mexican?

"There is no actual consensus of what the Asian-American interest is," said Jennifer Chiang, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Houston active in Republican Party politics and an 80-20 skeptic. "My mom and dad are just like everyone else in America," said Chiang, who grew up in Sugar Land, Texas. "They want to make sure the government doesn't take away all their money, they want to make sure their kids don't grow up in a crime-ridden area, or have a horrible education."

According to Woo, all they have in common, and the only agenda 80-20 is pursuing, is the desire to be treated as first-class citizens and to end the discrimination that seems to prevent Asian-Americans, despite their notable successes, from rising to the very top of business, academia and government. There has never been an Asian-American in the Cabinet, even the Cabinet that President Clinton assembled to "look like America."

While Asian-Americans are on the whole better educated and more prosperous than other Americans, it varies by group and there is also a larger proportion of Asian-Americans than whites living in poverty.

Because their numbers are small, Asian-American behavior in presidential elections is hard to pin down. Some exit polls showed President Bush handily defeating Clinton in 1992, and Bob Dole just edging out Clinton in 1996. Other polls showed Clinton winning.

In the last few years, Nakanishi and others say, there has been a drift toward the Democrats. But the recent low point for Asian-Americans was the fund-raising scandals surrounding Clinton's 1996 re-election effort that focused on some Asian-American figures and led Democrats to swiftly put distance between the party and Asian-American contributors generally.

"The image of the whole community was tarnished by the misdeeds of a few," said Woo. The experience confirmed for him that in the eyes of many, "Asian-Americans are perpetual foreigners."

Woo said slow and steady progress was OK, but in the wake of the scandals, he said, "We were no longer making slow progress. We were regressing, and I didn't think we should tolerate that."

Woo, 62, was born in Shanghai but attended high school in Hong Kong. In the mid-1950s, he came to the United States to attend Georgetown College in central Kentucky. He was known as "Woo Number 2." "Woo Number 1" - Chia-Wei Woo - was a schoolmate from Hong Kong a year ahead of him at Georgetown.

Chia-Wei Woo returned to Hong Kong, where he is now president of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. But S.B. Woo stayed and went on to become a professor of physics at the University of Delaware and a politician, winning election as lieutenant governor in 1984 in a state still only 2 percent Asian.

In building 80-20, Woo recruited a leadership much like himself. While Woo said he became a Democrat because he likes to be on the side of the "little guy," the 80-20 steering committee is no redoubt of populism. It includes a Harvard University mathematician, a molecular biologist, a nuclear physicist and Chang-Lin Tien, the former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, who recently had both a minor planet and a crude oil tanker named for him.

In the primaries, Bill Bradley was the first to endorse 80-20's agenda, followed by Gore. The Republicans did not, and for six weeks 80-20 called for a boycott of the GOP and some adherents left the party. But other Republicans cried foul, and in mid-April the boycott was lifted.

Asked about 80-20, the Bush campaign released a Feb. 29 letter the governor wrote to Dr. John B. Tsu, a longtime Republican activist and member of Bush's California steering committee, expressing general support for "expanding opportunities for Asian-Americans in the public and private sector."

Matt Fong, the co-chair of the Bush campaign in California, questions whether the 80-20 leadership will truly give his candidate a fair shake. Woo has registered as an independent and has forsworn ever again holding elective or appointive office, and members of the 80-20 steering committee promise a scrupulously fair process. "It is nonpartisan," said Dr. Stephen Ko, a staunch Reaganite deeply involved in Republican Party politics in New Jersey.

Beyond this election, 80-20 hopes to grow to 1 million e-mail addresses by November 2001, and 2.5 million by 2002. But already, said Chang-Lin Tien, "Regardless of what happens it has achieved a great purpose of heightened awareness among the Asian-Americans in participating in American mainstream politics."

Times staff contributed to this report.

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