How not to run in a US election
The election of Donald Trump as US president worries Bangladeshi Americans. Trump rode to victory on a wave of a nativist animus that has given a new lease of life to racists and Islamophobes.
One way to fight back is to get involved in mainstream politics, but too many expatriate Bangladeshis are still too caught up in their perennial Awami League-BNP political feuds to look beyond.
It's time to take a page out of the playbook of other minorities. Latinos and Asian Americans have an impressive track record. In Atlanta, where I live, Nobel Peace laureate Martin Luther King Jr. created history in the 1960s with his victorious struggle to gain civil rights for African Americans.
However, there's a right way to go about it and a wrong way to go about it.
When Bangladeshi American Mohammad Ali Bhuiyan threw in his hat in the special Congressional race last April, he generated a fair amount of buzz among local Bangladeshis.
I would love to see a Bangladeshi – or an immigrant of colour, for that matter – get elected. However, I was deeply sceptical about Bhuiyan's chances.
A Congressional constituency is fairly large, and it's difficult for a first-generation immigrant to get widespread local acceptance without any discernible local involvement.
The track record of successful minority immigrant politicians begins at a humbler place. They run for city council or the local school board. They show up at local city council meetings, organise around local issues, build networks and coalitions, and then move up the political ladder.
Bhuiyan likely thought it would be a clever move, because the rules were a little different in the special election that he ran.
Here all candidates – Republican and Democratic – run together in a "jungle" primary. A candidate who wins an absolute majority is elected outright. Otherwise, the top two vote getters compete in another run-off race.
While making his pitch Bhuiyan told Bangladeshi Americans that with a gaggle of Republicans running, all he needed was 5,000 votes to make it to the run-off. Given the fact that Bangladeshis, like all minorities, are overwhelmingly Democratic Party supporters, he tried to finesse his Republican credentials by soft-pedalling the issue.
It turned out that voters, Bangladeshi or otherwise, did not buy it. He failed abysmally, getting less than 500 votes in an election where 192,000 votes were cast.
So, what went wrong?
For starters, he ran a lacklustre campaign. In this digital age, Bhuiyan's initial website was riddled with appalling grammatical errors. Credit to him for fixing those errors, but the final website still left a lot to be desired. Policy issues were dealt with brief, vague platitudes. There was little sign of much activity or coalition building.
Bhuiyan's electoral bid reeked of hypocrisy. He had earlier campaigned for Democratic senatorial candidate Jason Carter. His attempts to play down his Republican leanings turned out to be misleading, because after the election, he declared his support for the Republican candidate Karen Handel.
He is perfectly entitled to do that, but had he said that before, he would have a hard time campaigning among Bangladeshis.
You can make the case that partisan considerations should be secondary when Bangladeshis run for office. But this is the Deep South. This is the region where all the racist whites migrated en masse to the Republican Party in the 1960s after Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Even today, Republicans try to suppress minority voting by tightening rules. Their pretext is voter fraud, which scholars scoff at. A federal judge recently ruled against Georgia Republicans, ordering them to open voter registration. Bhuiyan's candidate, Karen Handel, called it a Democratic "trick." That doesn't sound terribly democratic.
Bhuiyan's attempts to win Republicans faced an uphill task as well. He just did not have the local influence. His name recognition, such as it was, cut both ways. He created a splash when he led a multi-million-dollar effort to host a summit of Nobel Peace laureates in Atlanta, but when the effort collapsed, with Bangladeshi Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus quitting the initiative, some blamed him.
In fact, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that Bhuiyan's bid was a hopelessly lost cause.
So why did he run?
For one thing, Bangladeshi candidates tend to draw adulatory attention in the expatriate Bangla press and in Bangladesh, but the reportage is typically uninformed and hyped. Repeated instances of Bangladeshis failing disastrously in US elections raise the disturbing question whether electoral victory is really their goal.
Winning a paltry two percent of the vote – as Bhuiyan did – is a colossal waste of political energy of expatriate Bangladeshis.
What first-generation immigrants – particularly South Asians – must recognise – is that a Congressional race is too ambitious an entry-level political race. A candidate of foreign descent needs to build coalitions, and the way to do it is to spend years in local involvement. Show up at city council meetings. Run for city council. Run for the school board. Get active in local issues. Once credibility is built, acceptance will follow, but it will take time.
If Bangladeshi Americans can learn the right lessons, the losses will not have been in vain. Otherwise, these candidacies will just be forgettable political curiosities. Political analysts have an acerbic epithet for it: a "vanity candidacy," a campaign that's little more than a self-indulgent exercise to enjoy the fleeting media limelight. In other words, Andy Warhol's proverbial 15 minutes of fame.
The writer is a contributing editor for Siliconeer, a monthly periodical for South Asians in the United States.
Comments