Mee Moua in the Age of Obama

Two weeks after Barack Obama’s election in November, Mee Moua, who represents District 67 in the Minnesota Senate, was asked to what extent she believed his victory encouraged other people of color—such as herself—to run for office or for higher office. “Actually, it was kind of the reverse,” she replied, suggesting it was her experience that made her bullish about Obama’s chances. “I felt that if a Mee Moua could get elected on the East Side of St. Paul, then absolutely a Barack Obama could get elected President of the United States.”

Moua was elected, for the first time, in January 2002, in a special election to fill the vacancy created when the incumbent, Randy Kelly, was elected St. Paul mayor succeeding Norm Coleman, who was running for Paul Wellstone’s U.S. Senate seat in that fall’s election. Moua was not expected to win. She was thirty-two years old, competing against a more seasoned Republican and candidates from the Independence and Green parties in the city’s historically conservative, working-class eastern precincts. What’s more, though Moua was encouraged and supported by Wellstone himself, she had never run for significant office and her campaign manager was her equally callow cousin, who has since confessed to learning what little she knew about politics at the time by watching The West Wing on TV. And did we mention that Moua was a second-generation Hmong–American woman reaching for electoral heights no Hmong–American woman or man had achieved anywhere in America?

Moua was not, of course, the last unlikely name and face to be elected to important office in hitherto mostly lily-white Minnesota. Cy Thao, another Hmong American, was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in November 2002, also from St. Paul, and has been re-elected three times. Keith Ellison, a Muslim African American from Minneapolis, was elected to Congress in 2006 and easily re-elected in 2008. But such candidates, as well as a handful of persons of color elected to urban school boards and city councils, have been exceptions in our part of the world, even as our population grows increasingly diverse. Now, in the wake of Obama’s “transformative” election, the question is no longer whether a black man can be elected President, but what impact race still plays at lower levels of the electoral system. If, as the saying goes, all politics is local, can, for the sake of discussion, a Hmong–American woman be elected governor of Minnesota?

Mee Moua would seem to provide an obvious test case. Only seven years after that special election, Moua is a fixture at the legislature, heavily involved in issues ranging from district concerns such as funding for the Phalen corridor to large, bread-and-butter questions regarding education, housing, health care, crime, veterans’ affairs, and mass transit. As chair of the senate’s judiciary committee, she is also one of the body’s acknowledged powerbrokers, known among her colleagues as a “bridge builder” on a wide range of topics who, despite her partisan bona fides (a “friendly but fierce progressive,” the Pioneer Press once called her), is more pragmatic than ideological.

Not yet forty, Moua is a member of the Democratic National Committee and a leader among the new generation of DFLers, with growing influence well beyond her bailiwick. As such, she is one of a dozen-plus bright, ambitious, young or youngish elected officials or wannabes expected to have a future in the Age of Obama. But few if any of this cohort have a more interesting or inspiring personal history—or have had to negotiate a trickier career path or maintain a more delicate balance, operating in a crucible that has strengthened both her skill set and resolve for wider campaigns.

“I really don’t sit around and think about it,” she says when asked about the future, “but there are a lot of opportunities out there.” And, in this transformed environment, a practical and pragmatic politician such as herself would be a fool, she adds, to foreclose on any of them.

Photo by Joe Treleven

Mee Moua is a petite, physically unimposing, and, by her own assessment, “pretty ordinary-looking” woman. When she pays one of her frequent visits to elementary schools in her district, she is pleased to be told, as she often is, that “you look just like my mom.”

One on one with an inquiring adult, Moua comes across serenely comfortable in her role and supremely confident in her ability to perform it effectively. Though she spoke little English until she was eleven, she speaks today with no trace of an accent, and, unless you know an auctioneer, you probably don’t know anyone who speaks with greater velocity. Once she gets going, an hour interview easily morphs into a two-hour discussion, and it may require several polite interruptions by an aide before she’s willing to move on to her next meeting. She has trouble sitting still when she talks. She is especially animated when she launches, unprompted, into a passionate monologue about the glories and responsibilities of the democratic process. Like many refugees from desperate and dangerous parts of the world, she is a fervent believer in the American way.

Larry Jacobs, a political science professor at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, says of Moua’s background, “This is an American story. An old story, but a great story.”

Born in Laos, Moua came to America with her parents when she was nine, part of the diaspora that uprooted Hmong from the Laotian highlands following the United States’ departure from Indochina in the mid-1970s and scattered them around the world. Moua’s family spent three years in a Thai refugee camp before eventually settling in St. Paul, which would soon be home to the largest single concentration of Hmong refugees in America. (The 2000 census counted 43,000 Hmong in Minnesota, most of them in St. Paul and the northern suburbs. Unofficial estimates have placed the current number as high as 70,000.) Intelligent and driven, she became the first member of her family to speak English fluently, excelled in school, and, initially with a career in medicine in mind, earned a scholarship to Brown University in Rhode Island, where she graduated in 1992. She went on to earn a master’s degree in public policy at the University of Texas and a juris doctorate from the University of Minnesota’s law school. Later, as a young lawyer with Leonard, Street and Deinard in the Twin Cities, she worked on the successful St. Paul school board campaign of an uncle, Neal Thao, and became familiar with the legislative sausage grinder as a lobbyist for Hmong–owned businesses. In 1998, she married Yee Chang, a St. Olaf grad and businessman, and with Chang bought a house on the East Side and started a family. They have three children.

Running for Kelly’s state senate seat was a test of her faith in the system. Few outside the local Hmong community—where, owing to her Ivy League diploma and law degree, she was a rising star—gave her much chance of winning. Ethnic considerations aside, says her cousin and confidant Pakou Hang, who may have been only half joking when she made that West Wing remark, “we were both novices.” But, knocking on doors, working her family and clan connections for funding, and building an expansive base of first-time voters, Moua captured a clear majority out of the four-person field. The first Hmong anywhere to be elected to a state post, she was an instant celebrity at the Capitol as well as an inspiration in Hmong enclaves around the world.

“I don’t come from powerful or wealthy people,” she says. Her father served as a medic with an American aid organization in Laos; now sixty-one, he works in the shipping and receiving department of a manufacturing company in Brooklyn Park. Her mother was employed by a local food processor before retiring early with physical disabilities. “But on my father’s side,” Moua continues, “I happen to be the second-oldest grandchild and second-oldest niece, and on my mother’s side, the first born. That gave me an edge, but also the responsibility to lead a straight life and be a good role model, because it wasn’t just my three siblings looking at me, it was all those cousins on both sides of the family. I have uncles who were college-educated, and they paved the way for me, the first niece. Then it was my turn to show my siblings and cousins the way.”

Thirty years after taking root here, the Twin Cities’ Hmong community bristles with lawyers, physicians, educators, and entrepreneurs of both sexes. But stereotypes of a backward, static, and rigidly patriarchal society persist among white Minnesotans, a point of view that overlooks the many individual examples to the contrary and widespread evidence of the clear-eyed pragmatism that has allowed Hmong culture to survive centuries of struggle and deracination.

“If I wanted to do something,” Moua says, “I’ve never felt I had to hesitate because of cultural constraints. Plus, it always served my family’s—and my community’s—purpose for me to be assertive and aspirational. In each extended Hmong family, there are one or two people who serve as the ultimate resource. I may be a lawyer, but I’ve helped people muddle through medical and financial problems, providing advice and counsel and helping them think through their issues.” That has required maturity, judgment, and the development of interpersonal skills that, she says, “have proved very helpful professionally.” In Moua’s case, “professionally” means politically. The attributes she needed to help her kin adjust to American life have contributed to her growth as a resourceful policymaker and campaigner.

“Mee works very hard at her job and very hard at relationships,” says Jeff Blodgett, the longtime Wellstone consigliere and director of Barack Obama’s election campaign in Minnesota. “I remember her in 2002, when she ran for the first time. I remember thinking she could use some seasoning—more experience speaking to groups, a better sense of how you deal with people pulling you in a million directions, more skill keeping her focus. Well, she’s grown tremendously in the years I’ve had a chance to observe her.” Moua, in fact, was heavily involved not only in Obama’s campaign (here and around the country), but in the 2008 campaigns of Al Franken and Ashwin Madia. She was highly visible even in suburban districts, such as the Third Congressional, where Madia, a second-generation Indian American, was challenging three generations of white–Republican control, but where people of color are still a small percentage of the population. “She did a lot of work for us in the Hmong community,” Blodgett says, “but she was a general surrogate for us on the road as well.”

Jacobs describes Moua as a “cross-over politician” who “has roots in the ethnic community as well as the ability to interact with the mainstream.” He adds, “For someone who’s thinking of running for election or standing for re-election, she’s on the must-call list.”

Al Franken’s campaign called Mee Moua when Franken’s U.S. Senate nomination was almost derailed on the eve of the DFL state convention last spring. U.S. Representative Betty McCollum and other women within the party’s hierarchy were incensed by a “pornographic” satire that Franken wrote for Playboy years ago. Hoping to tamp down the criticism, says Pakou Hang, now a graduate fellow at the U of M’s Humphrey Institute, Franken’s people asked Moua to publicly endorse him, which she did. “There are just a lot of people in the party—women and its progressive base—who respect her and what she represents,” Hang says. “It might be too strong to say she saved Franken’s endorsement, but she certainly gave him credibility when he needed it.”

Moua’s endorsement of Chris Coleman in St. Paul’s 2005 mayoralty election was likewise important. Coleman was challenging Randy Kelly, who had developed substantial, if sometimes controversial, connections within the city’s Hmong community. According to observers, Moua’s involvement helped neutralize Kelly’s advantage and gave Coleman instant credibility as someone the Hmong could trust. That’s believed to be critical now that Hmong Americans make up, by some estimates, as much as 20 percent of the city’s voters.

There are, however, hazards to being designated the face and voice of a diverse group of people, as Moua and Cy Thao, her colleague in the House, have discovered. It’s not unusual, both say, to receive calls from reporters and other interested parties seeking information about something—usually bad—that’s happened in the Hmong community. Gregg Aamot, who reported extensively on the Hmong in the Twin Cities while working for the Associated Press, recalls Moua’s frustration when asked for comment on Hmong crime and other difficult topics. The 2004 murder of six Wisconsin deer hunters by a Hmong immigrant was a memorable example. Not the least of Moua’s consternation, says Aamot, was her belief that only the negative side of Hmong culture was reaching the general public through the mainstream media. “Why don’t you come to me about the good stuff?” he recalls her saying.

A legislator is no more a spokesperson for his or her nationality or an expert on every aspect of the culture than any other individual, Thao says. Referring to a colleague from a nearby district, he notes with a laugh, “Sheldon Johnson doesn’t get those kinds of questions.”

Moua and Thao have also discovered that winning an election (and helping others win theirs) is sometimes easier than pleasing the people who helped elect you, and that greater peril often lies within one’s power base than outside of it. Not counting the bigots who exist in every constituency, Moua’s fiercest critics have been Hmong Americans—especially Hmong–American women much like Moua herself.

The lightning rods have been issues rooted in ancient traditions in an ancient culture whose elders fear assimilation and the gradual extinction of those traditions. For at least fifteen years, to use perhaps the most notable example, members of the Twin Cities Hmong community and sympathetic legislators have wrestled, on and off, with bills that would solemnize Hmong marriage rites. In traditional Hmong culture, families negotiate marriage arrangements, including dowries, between the bride and groom; mej koob (pronounced may-kong) serve as middlemen, each representing a family. (Though it’s estimated that half the local Hmong population is Christian, many Hmong, including Christians, still follow the venerated animist traditions at weddings and funerals.) The problem is, mej koob, unlike priests, pastors, or rabbis, have no standing in the eyes of the state, so if couples don’t also register at the courthouse, the marriages don’t exist under law.

In the mid-1990s, elders from the Hmong community’s eighteen clans approached state representative Andy Dawkins about sponsoring a bill that would give the mej koob the same standing as mainstream religious officials. But the proposed legislation was vehemently opposed by a multicultural group of women led by Ilean Her, a smart, young Hmong–American lawyer—and in some respects a doppelganger of Mee Moua—who heads the Council on Asian–Pacific Minnesotans, a state agency that represents people from some forty countries. They argued that such a bill would legitimize an outmoded and oppressive patriarchy that encourages both underage marriage and polygamy. When later iterations of the bill surfaced, authored or coauthored by Moua and Thao, Her again mobilized the opposition, and non–Hmong legislators allied with Her attached amendments that would make the mej koob liable for illegal unions and responsible for reporting illegal behavior. Moua and Thao withdrew the bills, the legislation never came to a vote, and the Hmong legislators were hotly criticized by all sides. The criticism stung—and stuck.

“Oh, sure,” says Moua, “there are Hmong–American women—a lot of them professionals my own age—who don’t like me because they think I’m not feminist enough, that I give in too much to tradition. They don’t think I’m pushy enough, that I’m not working hard enough, that I’m not using my position to break down the male hegemony. There are also Hmong–American men who feel threatened by me and say I abuse my husband and don’t clean my house.”

Her, who has worked with Moua on other issues important to the Asian community, says Moua “took the criticism personally.” Moua sighs and acknowledges that during the marriage-bill firestorm she “felt like an outsider in my own community.” She also concedes that an often sticky situation is part of the job. “There’s often an over-expectation of what’s deliverable,” she says. “People walk into my office and say, ‘You’re the Hmong senator. We got you elected. Now here’s what we want you to do.’ To which I have to say, ‘No, no, no, no. I’m a Minnesota state senator who happens to be Hmong. If you’re Hmong and you live in District 67, I’m your senator. If you’re Hmong and you don’t live in District 67, I embrace you, but I also represent a whole lot of Minnesotans who are not Hmong.’ ”

At the end of the day, she adds, she can’t help but “default to my life experience, to my Hmong-ness, to my womanhood—but that doesn’t mean I don’t represent everybody.”

On a sunny Saturday afternoon less than two weeks before Obama’s election, Mee Moua cohosted a rally sponsored by the DFL’s Asian Pacific Caucus at St. Paul’s Central High School. The auditorium was only about half full, but the crowd comprised many well-dressed, middle-aged Asian Americans who looked as though they could and would add to the coffers of the candidates running with the caucus’s endorsement. In the aisles and the hallways outside the auditorium were many more energized young people, mainly Asians and other people of color, most of whom carried clipboards, handed out flyers, and seemed eager to be part of the get-out-the-vote canvassing that would follow the rally.

Joining Moua and Cy Thao onstage that afternoon was a virtual who’s who of the Twin Cities’ DFL electorati and aspirants, including U.S. representatives McCollum and Ellison, state auditor Rebecca Otto, Minnesota Senate majority leader Larry Pogemiller, Minneapolis mayor R. T. Rybak, Third Congressional District candidate Madia, and U.S. Senate candidate Franken. It was the kind of rally Democrats of a certain age would find nostalgic, reminiscent of long-ago Saturday-afternoon pep fests with the likes of Bruce Vento, George Latimer, and a hyperexuberant upstart named Paul Wellstone—except there were Asian acrobats and rappers performing between speeches and the white faces were in the minority.

Though most of the Anglo politicians appeared unable to break the bad habit of talking (exaggeratedly loud and slow) to immigrants as though they were children or simpletons, everybody seemed comfortable and in their element. Nobody said anything from the stage that they hadn’t, by this point in the endless campaign year, said a thousand times, but there was an energy and excitement that even seasoned pols can’t easily fake. Like all but the most tremulous Democrats, the afternoon’s speakers and listeners alike seemed to believe that their side was going to score big time on November 4. If the show had a star, though, it was Moua, whom Pogemiller described as holding “one of the two or three most powerful positions in the state” and who, mike in hand and striding energetically around the stage, moved between her native Hmong and her near-flawless English with ease and bravado. Though she isn’t up for re-election until 2010, she gave off the high-wattage glow of an imminent winner.

Before Franken was nominated, Moua’s name was among a long list of possible challengers for Norm Coleman’s Senate seat. (So were Aaron Peterson, Joe Atkins, and half a dozen other not exactly household names.) Excited bloggers talked about Moua’s “rock star” status at the Capitol and her ability to connect with broad swatches of the DFL rank and file. But, she says, “at that juncture, I just didn’t think it would have been the right move for me to try.” (Besides, she says, “I really like Al.”)

It’s difficult to find anyone among party regulars who doesn’t have good things to say about Moua, whether, like former St. Paul mayor Latimer, they bring a long view or, like Jeff Blodgett, they offer fresher perspectives. Typical is the comment of Andy Dawkins, the former legislator and St. Paul city council member who’s now in private law practice. “What you appreciate right away about Moua is her brainpower, the clarity of her goals, and her idealism. What I didn’t come to appreciate until later on is her extreme likability. In that sense, she’s like one of those old pros who does the backslapping you need to do and gets to the right places at the right time to say the right things to the right people. In politics, that’s the way you win support and become effective.”

At the same time, no one doubts the improbability of even a talented and assertive minority-group member moving from an inner-city district to statewide electability, at least without more time and an interim step or two. “The next couple of years will be important for Moua,” says Larry Jacobs. “Will she be able to establish an identity that transcends the Hmong vote and appeals to hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans?” So far, he says, he hasn’t seen evidence of her doing that. But, so far, she really hasn’t had to, at least on her own behalf. It’s very possible, of course, that Moua’s position as a leader of the majority caucus forced to make wrenching choices in the face of the state’s almost $5 billion deficit may work against her political aspiration. But the same pressures would also work against Paul Thissen, Margaret Anderson Kelliher, Tom Bakk, Pogemiller, Rybak, Chris Coleman, and other ambitious lawmakers and leaders who may have their eyes on a larger prize.

A statewide campaign, in the best of times, would be extraordinarily labor intensive and expensive. “The people who’d hesitate to vote for me because of their perception of who I might be—I think I can change their mind, but it would take a lot of direct, personal contact,” Moua says. The larger question—Would a majority of Minnesotans be comfortable voting for a woman of color in 2010?—is impossible to answer for now. Some skeptics suggest that Madia’s loss in the Third District was a sign of reluctance to elect a person of color in greater Minnesota, but Madia himself discounts race as a substantive factor in that campaign. The essential point may be that it’s no longer preposterous to ask the question.

In late November, Moua, between a leadership conference in Japan, a political exchange trip to China, and preparations for the upcoming legislative session, reflected for a moment on her experience campaigning for the President-elect in diverse venues across the country. “I was a very good representative of Obama’s message,” she said. “I only had to share my own personal story and let people know how much like my story his is. And it’s true what he said: This is not about black America or white America or Asian America. It’s about the United States of America. Really, people like to hear that.”