I think a Chinese-American is highly unlikely to ever get elected President of the United States, for the following reasons:
Asians comprise a much smaller percentage of the American population than whites, African-Americans or Hispanics; therefore they wield considerably less political clout than many other voting blocs.
The United States has a strategic rivalry with China; therefore, electing a Chinese-American candidate would seem, to many voters, like electing a Russian-American president during the Cold War. Throw in America’s national debt owed to China, and it just wouldn’t fly with voters. It would simply set off too many alarm bells in American voters’ heads. Plus, there’s the whole “Yellow Peril” social attitude.
An Asian-American candidate might have a difficult time drawing the support of African-American or other minority voters.
Asian-Americans, to date, have shown relatively little political ambition.
Asian-Americans are often still perceived as foreigners.
Eh, German-American Wendell Willkie got on a major party ticket in 1940, and America’s relationship with Germany was a lot rockier in 1940 than the the US’s is currently with China. While I’m sure there are some elements of the US electorate that wouldn’t vote for a Chinese person, I suspect it’d be less of a problem than being Black or Mormon, and yet both of those demographics made it onto major party tickets during the last election.
Just statistically, I doubt we’ll see a Chinese-American President in the near future, simply because there aren’t that many Chinese Americans, and many of the ones that are here are relatively recent immigrants and thus ineligible to run (in large part because there Chinese immigration was limited to small quotas until the 60’s). But that’s just due to the small pool of potential candidates, not because I think Chinese-Americans are inherently unelectable.
All that means is that statistically speaking its less likely you’ll have a Chinese American than a white President, which is completely fair.
lol. US-Chinese rivalry has yet to reach the level it was during the Cold War. Beyond that, most Americans are perfectly capable of distinguishing between Americans of Chinese descent and actual foreigners-this is after all a country that elected someone with the middle name of “Hussein” five years after the Iraq War.
There is no reason why a Chinese-American can’t have the skills that make a successful politician. Some people stupidly believe that Democrats nominated and elected Obama because he is black. Much the same way Democrats nominated Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. He was, simply, the most appealing candidate in that election cycle. I don’t think there is sufficient anti-Chinese sentiment in this country to automatically discount the right person.
Not counting Hawaii, which has had many: Washington elected a Chinese-American governor. The “racist” South (not my opinion!) elected two separate Indian-Americans as governors, granted one claims the nutjob vote, and the other does have idiots saying racist shit about her (but give one idiot a soapbox and it appears bigger in significance). Senators were elected in HI and CA. Representatives from HI, CA, IL, LA, etc. plus some other states that voted for people with some Asian ancestry.
Basically, your point #1 is the most valid and it’s just a matter of statistics. Any reservations that voters have about race X pales to electing a black president, which happened last I checked. Muslim and Atheist are probably less electable (and even still apparently over half, 60% and 58% respectively, would vote for that president! The poll didn’t ask about Asian ancestry.)
Point #2 is a minor issue, I think, but most people will realize that the guy with the California accent is probably not a sleeper agent, except Alex Jones.
John Ensign is 1/8 Filipino? Huh.
Err… while he is/was not the worst South American leader, he still had dictatorial aspirations and there is some question about whether his elections were fair.
I see no obstacle per se with a Chinese-American getting elected President. Other than the lack of any strong Chinese-American Presidential prospects. We’ve only had one Chinese-American governor, Gary Locke.
As far as Asians go, it’s looking more like we’ll see our first Indian-American President first.
If you had told me ten years ago that a half black guy was going to be elected president after Bush I would have called you crazy, so I think it’s possible eventually.
All generalizations of the form “No one of the X ancestry/race/sex/sexual orientation/marital status/species/planet of origin will ever reach the position of Y” are useless. You know nothing about what attitudes people will have in the future. For instance, until 1836 all Supreme Court Justices were Protestants. Until 1916 they were all Christian. These days most American don’t even know or care that not a single Justice is Protestant. Three are Jewish and six are Catholic (according to what their ancestry or their upbringing or their current church membership is). Surprisingly little about that is even mentioned in any news source.
Yeah, if Obama can overcome the “angry black thug” racist stereotype, I’m sure SOME Asian-American politician can overcome the “emasculated wimp with nothing down below” or “inscrutable exotic dragon lady” stereotype.
I don’t think it would be a major issue. I feel that for the majority of the United States, there is no significant anti-Chinese-American prejudice. I think it’s just a matter that for most of the country, the Chinese-American population is so small that they’re seen as exotic rather than threatening.
Are you talking about Jindal here? I can’t see it.
I would have no problem voting for a Chinese-American. As long as he or she has policy beliefs that I agree with. I could care less about their ethnicity.
Not Jindal specifically, just that there are two Indian American governors and no Chinese-American governors. Nikki Haley’s stock is still pretty high.
No one seems to have mentioned what might be the most important point - not necessarily homegrown racism or xenophobia, but that stemming from fear of China and its influence; we’re been at increasingly tense levels of economic conflict for some time now, and if I were on the election committee of a candidate with evident Chinese heritage, I’d be concerned about a vague public rejection based on that international tension.
Put another way, Obama had to overcome US racism - but he can’t be seen as the representative or puppet of a powerful opponent nation. The Indian candidates maybe straddle a little of that but I don’t think most USAians see India/Pakistan as any political threat.
Put it this way: How many senior elected officials with evident Russian heritage did we have between 1946 and the 1980s? That might be a better way to view how Chinese-ancestry candidates might be viewed by the public in this era.
(And look at how many German-American public and political figures quietly changed their names and downplayed their immigrant ancestry during the two big wars. They could blend into general white Euro-American culture a little more easily, with either an ambiguous family name or a changed one. But evident German-Americans were distrusted during these eras, even when their family roots here were deep.)
> . . . look at how many German-American public and political figures quietly
> changed their names and downplayed their immigrant ancestry during the two big
> wars . . .
What, like Eisenhower? As far as I can recall, no important person of German ancestry changed their name during that period. The largest ancestry of Americans is German, and that’s been true for more than a century. A small proportion of Germans on reaching the U.S. changed their name to something more English-sounding, but that was in the late nineteenth century mostly, not in the mid-twentieth century. Incidentally, if you’re going to give me an example, don’t give me one where the person was Jewish. Yes, a lot of Jews changed their names, which were derived from German words, when they arrived in the U.S. or sometime after they arrived. They did it because the name gave them away as Jewish, not because the name was derived from German.
I may be thinking a bit more of the British, whose very ruling family changed their name from an uber-Germanic one to an ultra-English one.
Eisenhower may or may not be a good example since he was not elected until almost a decade after the war, but I take the point. I am pretty sure there are examples of non-Jewish German-Americans changing their names, possibly more during WWI than later, but I haven’t had enough coffee to bring any to mind.
I’ll stand by the rest of the post, references to Russians in US public service during the Cold War era, especially. I think “fear of the motherland” plays against US acceptance of certain immigrant populations, even now, and especially with Asians. It would only take a fraction of the rabid anti-Japanese feeling of the early 1940s to knock down vote totals for even an excellent candidate of Chinese ancestry.
I’d say that short of an openly professing Muslim with recent roots in any Middle East country, Chinese-Americans are probably more subject to this suspicion than any other. Maybe another decade will erase that - or our relations with China could take a really bad turn and just reinforce the prejudice.
FWIW, I knew a young lawyer of Chinese ancestry who has spent several decades involved in state politics (California) but deliberately avoided ever running for office. He’s a corridor politician and a very effective one… but no one much outside the game knows his name.
I find it quite unlikely that an Asian American will be elected, but then, as has been said who expected that a black candidate could win in 2008?
However, not buying into the whole “people only voted for Obama because he’s black” thing does not negate the fact that his race actually helped him when it might have been expected to be a liability.
Put simply, it got him more votes in the states where he needed them than it cost him in those same states. It also helped because it visualized difference from previous candidates which played into the whole “change” dynamic that was central to his campaign. Also there was, I think, a sort of “Colombo” effect, in which his race caused him to be underestimated by the opposition who either felt that he didn’t have “what it takes” or that people wouldn’t vote for him.
We still haven’t had a Jewish President and there are a lot more Jews in the “Presidential pipeline” than Asians.