The Asian media and some leaders in the Chinese community have not taken kindly to the San Francisco Democrats spurning all of the Asian American candidates for mayor - and are calling it a wake-up call that claiming Room 200 for the first time isn't a given.

The Democratic County Central Committee - a group of 32 whose endorsements carry a lot of weight among voters - recently endorsed Supervisor John Avalos as its first choice, City Attorney Dennis Herrera as second choice and opted to name nobody as third choice.

That meant no love for interim Mayor Ed Lee, state Sen. Leland Yee, Supervisor David Chiu, Public Defender Jeff Adachi or Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting. (Of the 11 serious candidates for mayor, nine are registered Democrats and could score an endorsement. That means more than half who were eligible are Asian.)

"Out of five candidates, not even one of them deserved an endorsement?" asked Steven Lee, a prominent elder in Chinatown who is backing the mayor. "That sounds like they don't like the Chinese, that there are some racial tendencies."

Steven Lee spoke out against the vote in the World Journal, a Chinese-language newspaper. Asian Week also wrote about the vote, noting the eight Asian members of the DCCC voted all over the map.

"The eight APA (Asian Pacific Islander Americans) county committee members could not provide a solid base to support any APA candidate," Samson Wong wrote in Asian Week. "If that foreshadows the APA vote this November, San Francisco will not have its first elected APA mayor."

More than a third of San Franciscans are Chinese, but only 18 percent of registered voters are, said David Lee, head of the Chinese American Voters Education Committee.

His organization is newly determined to register more Chinese voters and educate them about ranked-choice voting.

"Community leaders are calling for the community to work together, to set aside their differences," David Lee said. "There seems to be a sense of urgency that history may be slipping through the fingers of the community."

The Asian American candidates themselves, though, seem to be giving the DCCC endorsements a collective shrug.

Jim Stearns, campaign manager for Yee, said, "I think the DCCC was pretty straight up in voting based on their preferences on the issues."

He said it's ironic that Chinese leaders are calling for unity now after some of them, namely Chinatown power broker Rose Pak, had been vocal in their hatred of Yee for months.

"They're calling for it now because it would benefit Ed Lee," Stearns said. "When Chiu and Yee and Ting were the three Asian candidates in the race, there was no call for a community coalition from any of the people who are calling for it today."

Tony Winnicker, spokesman for Ed Lee's campaign, dismissed the DCCC's endorsement process as a sideshow.

"Our view is that as Democrats, we really ought to be focusing on re-electing President Obamanext year and returning Nancy Pelosito speaker of the House instead of ranking nine shades of blue for the local election," he said.

When asked why the DCCC didn't endorse a single Asian candidate, chairman Aaron Peskin said, "You'd have to ask 32 different people that question."

Peskin pointed out, though, that the committee has endorsed plenty of Asians in the past three years including three sitting supervisors, the assessor, the public defender and a host of school board and community college board members.

He added that the committee endorsed Avalos and Herrera at a time when Latinos, along with Asians, make up the fastest-growing community in San Francisco.

And that San Francisco hasn't had a Latino mayor since the 1800s, when they were called alcaldes.

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