Reporter
Get Out the Vo
Before Asian voters flooded the polls, nobody gave an unknown Vietnamese-born Democrat a chance to upset one of the most powerful Republicans in the Legislature. Houston, we have a new political landscape.
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“Immigrant voters got Hubert, and they knew he got them,” says Mustafa Tameez, Vo’s Pakistani-born political consultant. “Whether they came from Vietnam or Mexico, they knew that he understood their lives on a level that Talmadge Heflin could not.” The Vo campaign worked hard to reach this constituency, beginning with a massive block-walking effort last summer. Vo visited 2,500 homes in predominantly Vietnamese neighborhoods, while volunteers fanned out across Alief to talk to registered voters, many of whom had never been approached by a political campaign before. “If Urdu was the native language of the person who opened the door, we had someone who spoke Urdu who could tell them why they should vote for Hubert Vo,” says Tameez. The campaign also appealed to voters through ethnic radio stations, of which there are more than a dozen on Houston’s AM dial, four in Vietnamese alone. Vo began hosting a weekly call-in show on Radio Saigon Houston to field questions about the American political system and discuss the campaign issues. There were also letter-writing parties, like the one Tameez’s mother-in-law hosted in which five hundred notes were penned mostly by Pakistani and Indian Americans to prospective voters. “Essentially, the message was ‘From one South Asian to another, here’s why I’m voting for Hubert Vo,’” says Tameez.
Vo’s campaign cast Heflin as hopelessly out of touch with his district, an impression that Heflin hardly helped dispel when he became entangled in a custody battle over the child of his Ugandan housekeeper. Alleging neglect, Heflin and his wife, Janice, argued in court that the boy would be better off living with them. “We all know the terrible problem that black male children have growing up into manhood without being in prison,” Heflin testified. There proved to be no evidence to support the Heflins’ claims, and the case was dismissed. The episode did not win Heflin any support among new constituents, nor did a legislative record that seemed out of step with the needs of an increasingly diverse district. His votes in years past against both the hate crimes bill and the proposal to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a state holiday were hard to defend in a district that had become nearly 20 percent African American. Although Heflin went through the same motions as Vo, asking for votes at the local mosque and pressing the flesh at the Hong Kong City Mall, his folksy charm had come to seem more at home on the floor of the Legislature, or in the oak-paneled Austin Club, than in his own district.
Anglo politicians who have succeeded in winning reelection in “minority majority” districts in Houston have adapted to serve a changing constituency. Representative Scott Hochberg, whose district lies several miles east of Vo’s, endeared himself to Muslims by passing a bill last session making it a crime to label meat “halal” if it has not actually been butchered according to Islamic law. This session he has tried to pass legislation that would allow for the written portion of driving tests to be in Vietnamese. But Heflin rarely made such gestures, and by last fall, Republicans were nervous about his prospects. Tom DeLay hosted a fundraiser for him, and one of the party’s most influential moneymen, San Antonio entrepreneur James Leininger, contributed $50,000 less than three weeks before Election Day. In the end, Heflin spent $365,564 to Vo’s $120,388, but he carried just 9 of Alief’s 24 precincts. Only 3 House districts out of 150 in Texas flipped from Republican to Democratic that night. District 149 was one of them.
“AS A POLITICAL FORCE, the Asian community is still in its infancy,” says M. J. Kahn, a Pakistani American real estate developer who represents Alief on the Houston City Council. “We haven’t decided yet whether we are Republicans or Democrats.” Kahn decided to run as a Republican in 2003, after Arab Americans had voted in record numbers for George W. Bush in the previous presidential election. But the political allegiances of Houston’s immigrant community are fluid, and last November a plurality of the city’s Muslims—many of them frustrated with what they perceived as racial profiling by the Justice Department after September 11—voted for John Kerry. Kahn sees the fickleness of Houston’s Muslim vote as an indication that neither party has succeeded in winning the community’s allegiance. “In some ways, we feel for the Democrats, because it is the party of minority rights and of education, which is a very, very big issue for us,” he says. “But in other ways, we feel close to the Republican party, because many of us are small-business owners, and we are conservative when it comes to our families and our religion. The challenge for Republicans and Democrats is to convince us that their party is our party. Until then, this community is up for grabs.”
Vo, who closed Microland in 2001 and now runs a lucrative real estate business, became a Democrat out of a sense of obligation to those less fortunate. “The Democratic party is the underdog party, and as immigrants, we are underdogs,” he says. “Sometimes when Vietnamese people achieve success here in the U.S., they forget how hard the road was to get here. We need to remember where we came from.” Vo is doing his part to sway Vietnamese Americans on his monthly call-in show, Life in Politics, on Radio Saigon. “Vietnamese people remember Nixon and Ford fighting the communists, so they are grateful to the Republican party,” Vo says. “Sometimes you have to work to make them see why they should vote Democratic.” Radio Saigon has tremendous reach among Houston’s 150,000 Vietnamese Americans, so much so that the station received complaints from numerous Vietnamese restaurants about a falloff in business after it began airing a popular cooking show. “Older Vietnamese people think the Democratic party is the party of gay marriage and abortion,” Vo says. “I explain those issues so they can understand them as immigrants. I say that gay marriage and a woman’s right to choose are issues of personal freedom, like freedom of speech, like freedom of expression.” In a community populated by survivors of the Vietcong’s reeducation camps, it is an astute way to reposition the debate. “I tell them that Democrats are not immoral people,” he says. “We have the same family values as everyone else.”
The growing political power of Houston’s Asian Americans may be felt in a number of races next November. DeLay’s reelection campaign will be the most closely watched, but the fate of several other Anglo Republicans, among them state senator Kyle Janek and state representative Joe Nixon, may also be in question. Janek’s district stretches from Alief to Port Arthur, which is home to a sizable Vietnamese American population. Nixon’s district is bookended by Vo’s district to the west and Hochberg’s to the east. “Both could be vulnerable if a Vo-like candidate runs,” observes political analyst Murray. Republicans, who study the same demographic data, see the potential in recruiting Asian candidates; Vo says he has already been approached by a high-ranking member of the Legislature (he won’t say who) who asked him to consider switching parties. He has grown accustomed to Republicans’ questioning his party affiliation. “They say, ‘You’re a self-made man,’” he explains. “‘You didn’t need welfare and food stamps to succeed. So why aren’t you with the Republican party?’” But Vo has no plans to switch. So far, the only high-profile Republican in Texas who is Asian is state representative Martha Wong, a second-generation Chinese American whose district includes affluent Houston neighborhoods like River Oaks, West University Place, and Bellaire. The area could not be more far removed from Alief.
THE FORTUNES of the Democratic party seemed bright on a warm evening this spring, when four hundred Vo supporters gathered at a Vietnamese restaurant downtown for a belated appreciation dinner. Chinese American city council candidate Mark Lee worked the room, as did Jay Aiyer, an Indian American city-council-at-large candidate. Against a red-white-and-blue backdrop, students from Alief high schools performed folk dances; girls in sparkling headdresses sashayed to Bollywood songs, and teenagers in white peasant skirts stomped to mariachi music. Vo’s campaign staff was as multicultural as the crowd: His Latino direct-mail consultant was there, as were his African American treasurer, his Pakistani American media consultant, and his folksy Anglo attorney (“We’d like to thank all y’all,” Larry Veselka said to the crowd with a tip of his white Stetson). Vo rose toward the end of the evening to sound the themes of his campaign and thank the audience. His 81-year-old father, who sat a few feet away, beamed. “I will not let you down,” Vo told the crowd to sustained applause. One of the last speakers of the night was Gordon Quan, the city councilman who is considering challenging DeLay. “Hubert provides hope that we can take back this state,” Quan said with a broad grin. “Look around this room. This is Texas.”
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