October 12, 2009

Liu York City

By Sal Gentile

Retired Chinese workers trailed John Liu’s every move, reaching out to touch his clothes as he passed.

As he greeted voters on the Bowery, cars honked and strangers screamed at him, pleading with him in Mandarin to let them take his picture.

Running late to a rally in Chelsea the day before the run-off, Liu attempted a quiet entrance as public advocate candidate Bill de Blasio ripped through his stump speech in front of roughly 200 United Workers. But when a crowd of mostly Chinese immigrants glimpsed him at the back of the room, they swarmed him, racing to be the first to get an autograph.

“Slow, slow, slow,” Liu counseled them, clambering his way up the podium.

Despite the frenzy, he kept an even keel.

Just another day on the trail for the man who, three months out from inauguration day, is already an icon.

“It was like,” recalled Assembly Member Micah Kellner, “campaigning with a rock star.”

At the start of his campaign for citywide office, the question was whether New York’s first Asian-American lawmaker could channel the devotion of his admirers into broad electoral success. Now the question is whether his win is evidence of a fundamental realignment in urban politics or a consequence of a conglomeration of circumstances and one-time deals.

Many of Liu’s supporters say the former, and hope he will run for and win the city’s top job in 2013, assuming Mike Bloomberg wins re-election this year.

“Trust me,” one politico said firmly as the results streamed in on the night of the run-off, “in four years, he’ll be the next mayor.”

First, though, he has to map out a path for the comptroller’s office and a gameplan for 2013.

“Can he move from Transportation Committee chairman to doing the work of the comptroller’s office? That’s a big transition,” said Bob Olivari, a longtime labor operative who ran the ground game for one of Liu’s opponents, David Weprin, before supporting Liu in the run-off. “He could lose credibility.”

The more fundamental balancing act will be the political task of holding together his improbable coalition, preserving and enhancing the mechanics of a campaign that he and a few key players began setting in motion years ago, in which labor supported a non-traditional labor candidate, black and Latino voters united after years of division, lefty Jewish candidates were set aside by much of the lefty Jewish establishment, and an immigrant from Taiwan who had to relearn Mandarin became a hero of old-school progressive politicians.

“It’s a generational achievement,” observed Assembly Member Darryl Towns moments after Liu was declared the winner. “The new New York is coming of age.”

The genesis of Liu’s historic campaign can be traced back to an agreement reached over breakfast one morning in mid-February. Kevin Wardally, the next-generation Harlem political guru, was there. So were Kevin Finnegan, the political director of the health care workers’ union 1199/SEIU, and his counterpart at the Hotel and Motel Trades Council (HTC), Neal Kwatra. Bill Lipton, the deputy director of the labor-backed Working Families Party (WFP), participated as well.

But Liu ran the meeting.

Liu had been discussing and planning ahead for a citywide campaign with close associates and advisers for years. Supporters in the council have been plugging him for higher office from the day he first arrived at City Hall.

“He’s driven, and he’s going to move on to this thing and then the next thing. He has a sense in his mind of what he wants to accomplish,” said Evan Stavisky, a political consultant who attended Bronx Science with Liu and worked on his 2001 Council campaign. “That probably served him well when he was in the corporate world, and it definitely served him well when he decided to get involved in politics.”

Liu began late last year by running for public advocate, despite routine suggestions and even some pleading from his supporters that he run for comptroller. He had, after all, been an actuary, they reasoned. When the mayor succeeded in extending term limits later that year, the pressure intensified. Bill de Blasio, who had been running for Brooklyn borough president, jumped into the race, as did Mark Green. Labor unions, members of Congress and some of Liu’s closest allies on the Council tried to persuade him to switch races, in order to clear the field for de Blasio, labor’s candidate. The WFP and its constituent unions, primarily 1199 and HTC, led that campaign.

But Liu and his advisers were skeptical until they were sure that Adolfo Carrión really was leaving for Washington. With that speculation ramping up during the months of the Obama transition, Liu’s advisers began poll-testing and focus-grouping a run for comptroller. The Working Families Party sensed an opportunity to consolidate behind a slate. The party’s lead unions, such as HTC, recognized a chance to solidify their growing Asian-American constituencies and get behind a trail-blazing candidate. Wardally and Bill Lynch, the Harlem consultant and Wardally’s mentor, could at last cobble together the winning coalition Liu had first pitched to them years ago.

Liu is a savvy deal-maker and relentless campaigner. Mabel Law, a former aide and executive director of the Flushing Business Improvement District, said Liu was dogged in his courtship of her when he was ramping up his first, unsuccessful Council run in 1997. Law was a student and community activist, but largely apathetic about politics. Liu traveled from Flushing to the Upper East Side just to make his pitch to her as she got off the train to walk to class. At the time, she had no idea who he was.

He brought that same intensity to the discussions about his campaign this year, piece-by-piece bringing everyone together who “hatched the strategy of why this made sense,” said one person involved in the arrangements. The WFP, through Lipton, played the role of broker, and with the party’s blessing the blueprints were sketched.

When Liu met months later with the party’s executive committee, his nomination sailed, despite what had once been considerable support for one of his opponents, Melinda Katz.

“I think he was a very easy sell,” said Dorothy Siegel, an executive committee member who screened the candidates, explaining the thinking of the unions’ political directors. “I think he was sold already.”

Jimmy Siegel was vacationing in the Hamptons, sipping coffee at the Amagansett Farmers Market on a Sunday morning in August, when he saw the headline blaring across the front page of the Daily News: “Ad Spins Yarn.”

Siegel, the visionary adman, had been brought into the campaign by Chung Seto, Liu’s closest adviser and, for several months, his campaign manager. Seto and Siegel had worked together on Eliot Spitzer’s 2006 campaign.

Seto and Wardally saw Siegel not just as an adman, but as the storyteller who could make Liu’s personal narrative convincing enough to appeal to black and Latino voters who may have been reluctant to vote for an Asian-American candidate.

“She realized that John had a good story, and that a lot was going to depend on how well we tell it,” Siegel said.

Siegel’s ads retold Liu’s past as a five-year-old emigrant from Taiwan, his years working in a sweatshop with his mother, his father’s decision to rename the family after the Kennedy clan. They were widely praised as the most compelling ads in the field, crucial to Liu’s appeal as the only candidate with a broad-based ethnic coalition.

Now they were being called a lie.

“When I saw that, I said, ‘Oh jeez, this is bad.’ This is the crux of our campaign. This is the crux of John’s appeal,” Siegel recalled. “If people believe the story, this campaign’s in deep trouble.”

The ads were especially effective because they centered Liu’s narrative on his mother, an endearing figure emblematic of New York’s immigrant heritage. (Liu’s friends say he has never been comfortable discussing his relationship with his father, a bank manager who was convicted of embezzlement just months before Liu’s 2001 Council victory. He seldom mentions the relationship in public.)

Without his core narrative, they figured, fissures would almost certainly begin to show in Liu’s fragile ethnic coalition. The mechanics of the campaign would break down. Volunteers would be harder to recruit. Get-out-the-vote would not work as well. Knocking on doors in Harlem and Central Brooklyn would be more difficult.

“His personal story was our most powerful tool in recruiting both volunteers and identifying voters,” said Kirsten Foy, an official in the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network who joined Liu’s campaign as the citywide field director in May.

A round of calls ensued. Seto assured Wardally and Siegel that, for better or worse, Liu would stand by the ad. The architects of his campaign describe that decision as perhaps the most fateful of the campaign.

“We were nervous in the first couple of days,” said a senior adviser.

In the immediate aftermath, Liu’s organizers monitored reaction from voters. Josh Gold, on leave from 1199/SEIU to help run Liu’s field operation with Wardally and Foy, received regular reports from the campaign’s canvassers in battlegrounds like Central Brooklyn. They asked organizers to pay attention to voters’ concerns, if they had any, about the story. They polled to see if people had a negative reaction. They prepared to recalibrate.

To the shock of all the political insiders who had initially predicted the scandal would end Liu’s campaign, the strategy of running forward without stopping managed to work. He kept retelling the story, even as reporters gaped.

“There wasn’t really that much reaction from the electorate,” Gold said.

The timing seems to have helped, Siegel added.

“It is the middle of August, when no one’s paying attention, everybody’s on vacation,” Siegel said. “I think ultimately it didn’t hurt us.”

Gold, Wardally and Foy poured the campaign’s remaining resources into fieldwork as the primary neared. Gold, a furtive behind-the-scenes operative who had studied under former 1199 political director Patrick Gaspard, imported lessons from the Obama campaign’s get-out-the-vote operation in Cincinnati, which he had overseen.

Gold was essentially running two parallel field organizations: One for Asian-American voters in neighborhoods like Chinatown, Flushing and Sunset Park, and one for African-American voters in places like Harlem and Central Brooklyn.

The Asian-American get-out-the-vote machine was more conventional and comparatively less expensive. Unpaid volunteers were easier to come by, and the campaign focused primarily on getting already-committed voters to the polls. Liu’s advisers compiled a database of about 50 targeted apartment complexes in heavily Asian neighborhoods, such as 10 Division Street near Confucius Plaza, where there were at least 500 registered Asian-American Democrats. On election night, canvassers were assigned to walk up and down the halls of the building, monitoring returns. Turnout in those districts reached as high as 67 percent.

The second effort, focused on non-Asian voters, was more extensive. Focus groups conducted by Wardally and Lynch in their offices on Lenox Avenue in Harlem told them that black and Latino voters could be persuaded to vote for an Asian-American for citywide office. They asked questions like, “Could you vote for an Asian-American candidate?” and showed them photos of Liu.

Surprisingly, a lot of them already knew Liu’s name, thanks to his years marching with the Rev. Al Sharpton and other prominent black leaders against racially charged incidents like the Sean Bell shooting.

“They had seen him in their neighborhoods. They had seen him on TV with people they knew,” Wardally said. “We walked out of reviewing our research knowing we could make this happen if we weave this together right.”

Armed with Liu’s personal narrative and an army of local elected officials as validators, hundreds of paid canvassers did “persuasion work,” identifying voters who could be swayed.

“The strategy was always to broaden John’s base beyond the Asian-American base and give him exposure in Central Brooklyn, Harlem, the Bronx—the pockets of New York City where we knew that the coalition that needed to be put together was actually going to be found,” Foy said.

According to an exit poll conducted by the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), about 20 percent of Asian-American voters in the primary were newly registered. Liu’s advisers estimate that the campaign and local civic organizations enrolled as many as 20,000 of those new voters.

That figure includes culturally conservative Asian-Americans who were initially registered as Republicans or independents. Liu’s aides recognized years before the primary that an alarming number of Asian-American voters were not Democrats, and could not vote in a Democratic primary. Bloomberg’s 2005 campaign—on which Gold worked as an organizer—had enrolled many of them as independents. So Liu’s aides urged the Asian-American civic associations in places like Flushing and Chinatown that were registering new voters to transfer existing ones from the GOP to Democratic rolls as well.

On the night of the run-off, there was the sense of a political renaissance. Asian-American voters, through the sheer force of the political establishment and of Liu’s convincing personal appeal, had aligned in a way that shifted the city’s politics out of the provenance of traditional Democratic voters on the Upper West Side. The idea of a “minority coalition” had been changed in ways no one would have even attempted to do just a few years ago.

“When people have talked about organizing communities of color, they’re talking about blacks and Latinos,” said Margaret Fung, the AALDEF’s executive director. “Now, finally, there’s hopefully a broadened view about what that means.”

Five days after the run-off, John Liu sampled a Mooncake, a traditional Chinese pastry made of lotus-seed, egg yolk and crust at the Museum of Chinese in America on Centre Street. He was being honored in a ceremony that coincided with the Zhongqiu, or “Mid-Autumn” Festival, a lunar harvest.

“I’ve been eating these for two weeks now,” he joked, carving out a small wedge with a plastic knife. “This is the only thing we had on the campaign trail, because people keep bringing Mooncakes.”

Liu’s victory is understandably a milestone for Chinese-American voters. In his years on the Council, Liu was routinely celebrated by Chinese political organizations and considered a spokesman for the broader Asian-American community, though he says he sometimes found that mantle frustrating. As a Council member from Flushing, it made sense to speak on behalf of Asian-Americans, since so many of them lived in his district.

As comptroller, he will represent a city that is 12 percent Asian-American. Latino voters, who make up as much as a quarter of the city’s population, meanwhile, remain without their first citywide win. If Bill Thompson does not win in November, Liu will be the only non-white citywide official, which could, political reality being what it is, lead to some friction.

Liu will have to navigate all that and more if he intends to preserve his coalition and position himself in a mayoral field—which, if polls hold, will begin to take shape at about 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 4.

There will also be competing political pressures, if he and Bloomberg are both elected. He will face off with a powerful and widely popular mayor, whose aides are clearly worried about Liu. One fretted about the coming “avalanche” and “us-versus-them” friction between Bloomberg and Liu, largely absent from the first seven years of Thompson’s term.

The unions that helped Liu piece together his winning coalition will expect much, too. They want Liu to put his investigatory powers to work more aggressively than Thompson, scrutinizing the mayor’s use of private contractors or wading into corporate governance issues.

“John has both the predilection and the proclivity to do muckraking investigations that actually have a bottom-line impact on people’s lives,” said one union supporter. “And he’s not afraid of the cameras, either.”

At a buffet-style restaurant down the street from the Museum, over a plate of rice, tofu and water chestnuts—“of which I am not a huge fan,” Liu sheepishly conceded—the comptroller-in-waiting refuted the notion that he would have to display his independence from unions and the WFP.

“I feel no need to go out of my way to demonstrate that,” he said. “To the extent that people climbed on board—and a lot of people did—I’m all the more gratified for it. I’m honored. But I feel no need to justify anything.”

That will mean that Liu, much as he did this year, will likely have to run without the support of editorial boards (whom he dismisses as “the cognoscenti”). He may also have to forfeit the support of private-sector unions and the WFP to de Blasio, who is quite clearly their preferred choice for the next mayoral election.

But Liu’s supporters argue that Liu can tap into his own coalition, forged this year, with the support of municipal unions such as DC 37 and perhaps the UFT, and the might of a newly invigorated Asian-American electorate.

“There are some folks taking up the ground that, ‘We just want to make it clear, Bill de Blasio is the labor-WFP candidate,’” said one elected official who supported Liu. “And I think there are some folks who are saying, ‘That doesn’t really matter, because John Liu has his own base of support.’”

An early test of that base will come in November, during the mayoral election. The Thompson campaign is encouraged by Liu’s presence on the ticket, believing he can provide a much-needed jolt of energy and star power. “He will be with us, and he will be with us in a lot of places, and that will matter,” said Eddy Castell, Thompson’s campaign manager. “You’re going to have Asian-American turnout of historic levels.”

After lunch, Liu raced to City Hall, where he was featured prominently in a Democratic “unity rally” for Thompson. Half an hour before he arrived, Chinese-American supporters crowded the plaza, anticipating his arrival. The Thompson campaign passed out placards in Chinese. A couple that did not speak English hoisted a banner that read “Chinatown Supports Bill Thompson.”

As the backdrop took shape, several overzealous Liu supporters held up “John Liu for Comptroller” signs, rather than the “Thompson for Mayor” ones provided by the campaign. Liu, occasionally bewildered by the affection of his supporters, whispered quietly to his aides to swap the Liu signs for Thompson ones.

When his turn came to speak Liu delivered a broadside against the mayor, one that brought noise from the crowd far beyond anyone else who took the microphone, including the man at the top of the ticket.

“More important than anything, Bill Thompson will not be a mayor that thumbs his nose at the will of the people,” Liu said, approaching a crescendo. “He wants to be mayor, not emperor!”

The crowd roared. Liu smiled, and offered a closing thought.

“The fact of the matter is, New York is ready,” he said. “New York City is ready for a change.”