It’s the latest effort in “identity” politics. Well-meaning supporters wanting their community to embrace the politician with whom they feel a personal affinity claim that person as one of their own. Rep. Mike Honda, an Asian American congressman from California, hails President Barack Obama as the “first Asian American President” because he spent much of his formative years living in Indonesia and Hawaii.
“He’s Asian in his upbringing. You cannot come out of Hawaii and not have an Asian approach to things.”
Lauren Fox, a US News and World Report correspondent, writes:
The details of Bill Clinton’s youth, along with a number of his hobbies while in the White House, often led some people to call Clinton “America’s first black president.”
Now that the country’s actual first black president has been in office for some time, California Rep. Mike Honda, Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee, wants to draw attention to whom he says is America’s first Asian-American president: Barack Obama.
Read more – Rep. Mike Honda: Obama is First Asian-American President – The Ballot 2012 usnews.com.
During the recent DNC convention, the Asian American Caucus touted President Obama’s appointment of a record number of Asian Americans to government posts, including the federal bench (18) and to his cabinet (3), including Secretary of Energy Dr. Stephen Chu.
Asian Americans in key swing states, such as Virginia and Nevada, may tip the balance to President Obama come November.
For a man so many distortionists want to be a Muslim, a Kenyan, a Socialist and a Half-frican, I’m glad to see that Asians are now embracing him culturally as what he is, a Hawaiian! BTW, Bill Clinton was not called the “first black president” due to his upbringing in Arkansas, it’s because of his overwhelmingly black support and his sense of “black cool” in his manner and walk. That his policies filled the prisons with black men and dropped the welfare rolls of poor single mothers, is not seen as detrimental to black folk apparently.
Funny, but if you read Bill Clinton’s memoir, My Life, he seems to embrace the belief that it’s due to his Arkansas upbringing and his cultivation of the black vote during his three runs for office there.
You omitted his returning to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a mentally-impaired black man convicted of capital murder (his botched suicide attempt left him brain-damaged) and his Sister Souljah moment in 1992.
BTW, does it make me Jewish because I grew up in the Bronx/NYC?