Yoon looks beyond Boston to enlist backers
May 18, 2009
By: Michael Levenson
WASHINGTON – The California congressman looked out on a crowd of 100 Asian-American political activists dining in a drab conference room at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Mike Honda urged them to donate to a rising star on the political scene: Sam Yoon, candidate for mayor of Boston.
“Boston has been waiting for a long time because the Irish have had it,” said Honda, addressing the annual dinner of the Asian American Action Fund. “I believe Sam is ready to take over and lead one of the major cities in the country.”
Yoon beamed. Such dinners have become crucial to his aspirations to become mayor of Boston, fueling him with applause, cheers, and financial support that are harder to come by at home, where Mayor Thomas M. Menino dominates the political establishment and where Yoon remains a relatively low-profile figure, unknown to 38 percent of residents, according to a recent Globe poll.
He has been working hard to cultivate the support, traveling the country to meet Asian-American political activists, who have enthusiastically embraced his campaign and showered him with donations. Many say Yoon, who became Boston’s first Asian-American city councilor in 2005, represents a promising new voice from a group that has been historically underrepresented in government.
“He’s a trailblazer in his own time,” said Bel Leong-Hong, chairwoman-elect of the Asian American Action Fund, which endorsed Yoon’s mayoral campaign and his 2005 and 2007 council campaigns. “What our organization is about is creating the pipeline to national office, and he’s certainly in that pipeline.”
Yoon has held few public campaign events in Boston, and last week his only public events were on Saturday, aides said. Yet over the past year he has courted donors in California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Chicago, and has more trips planned to Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Atlanta. His rainmaking has helped him be competitive in the mayor’s race. Since January, Yoon has raised $151,158, 52 percent of it from donors outside Massachusetts.
Still, because Yoon has been spending heavily, he has just $31,422 in his campaign account, far less than Menino’s $1.4 million war chest. His campaign is worried about the perception that he lacks substantial support from local donors.
Jim Spencer, Yoon’s strategist, said the campaign is in an “awkward position,” forced to travel outside Boston because many local donors are reluctant to snub Menino.
“We’ve called hundreds of donors who say, ‘I’d love to love to see Yoon as mayor, but I can’t do this. I’m afraid,’ ” Spencer said. Even so, he said, the campaign recently collected commitments of $25 to $70 from 145 donors in Boston. “I don’t want anybody to think we finance everything out of the city, because we don’t,” Spencer said.
Yoon confronted the issue in Washington on Wednesday night.
“I am proud of every single dollar, because you’re not a developer,” Yoon told the crowd of mostly young lawyers, activists and congressional staffers. “You’re not a construction company. You’re not a vendor who has business before the city. The mayor does not write your paycheck. Your motivation is the purest motivation there is which is, you are just proud of who I am.”
Yoon, 39, who was born in South Korea, is already among the most prominent Korean-Americans in elected office, along with the mayors of Irvine, Calif., and Edison, N.J. He has used his stature to raise his profile as a political activist.
Last year, Yoon founded a political action group, Asian Political Leadership Fund, which has raised $120,000 – $100,000 from a Korean-American hedge fund manager in New Jersey and $20,000 from Bernard Chiu, a Boston businessman who runs First Act Guitar Studio.
Yoon has spent $60,000 from the fund to run ads in Asian-language newspapers for candidates nationwide, including Hubert Vo, a Vietnamese-American state representative in Texas; Ashwin Madia, an Indian-American Iraq war veteran who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Minnesota; and Barack Obama.
“He’s not going to limit his ambitions to Boston,” said Annabel Park, a filmmaker and activist who attended the dinner. “Hopefully, he’ll run for higher office.”
Yoon was featured prominently at the event. He told the crowd he is challenging Secretary of State William F. Galvin to have the names of candidates printed in Chinese on election ballots.
The organizers announced that they would sponsor a summer intern to work on Yoon’s campaign and joked that it would be President Obama. They brought Yoon before the crowd and auctioned off a breakfast with him in Washington, which went to five attendees who bid $300 each.
Honda, who is vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, asked everyone to donate to Yoon. “The good news is that he has all the money he needs to run his campaign,” Honda declared. “The bad news is, it’s still in your pockets. So open up your pockets and talk to your friends and ask your relatives and everybody else to do the same.”
Yoon, who traveled with his finance director, Frank Woodruff, was at ease in the crowd, laughing, mingling, exchanging business cards and delivering a powerful exhortation on Asian-American political empowerment.
“We don’t have time to lose,” he told the crowd. “We are the community in this country who is the least represented in the halls of government, who have the least amount of experience in campaigns and politics. That’s just a fact. And yet our history goes back to 150 years, when the Chinese came and built the railroads. We have to catch up. So there is no time to lose. Now is the time.”
