By Namju Cho, Angela Chung, Julie Ha, Kai Ma, Michelle Woo and Fabiana Yu
TEAM OBAMA
The Sidekick / Eugene Kang
You may have wondered who that skinny guy golfing with the president is. As the special assistant to Obama, Eugene Kang is one of the lucky few who gets to go nearly anywhere the president goes. (For West Wing fans, think “Charlie.”)
Although only 24, Kang is no newcomer to politics. Just three years earlier, as a senior at the University of Michigan, he ran for City Council of Ann Arbor in his home state to represent the “student voice.” Narrowly defeated, Kang went on to play a key role as one of the 14 people on the Obama presidential exploratory committee in Chicago, as well as run an online website for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in support of Obama’s campaign.
So what is a “Special Assistant to the President”? Basically, a personal secretary for Obama, Kang will be responsible for the commander-in-chief’s scheduling, phone calls, emails, note-taking, in addition to — as the now famous photos expose — serving as his golfing buddy. He will no doubt have unique insight into the inner workings of this historic administration, which may later inform his own political aspirations.
The Liaison / Betsy Kim
Betsy Kim, a Democrat active in outreaching to Asian Pacific American voters, has been named the White House liaison to the U.S. Department of Defense.
Kim formerly served as counselor to the administrator of the Small Business Administration under the Clinton Administration. From 2005 to 2008, she was tapped by the Democratic National Committee to help increase APA participation in the party. She similarly ran outreach efforts in the APA community for the Obama for America headquarters in Chicago during the presidential campaign.
During the final two months of the election, she ran the Get Out the Vote operations in Northern Virginia.
A second-generation Korean American with roots in Hawaii, Kim graduated from Pomona College with a B.A. in government in 1985 and holds a J.D. from the University of Arizona College of Law.
The Big Spender / Ellen Kim
Wondering how much was spent on direct mailers from the Barack Obama campaign? What about those stage lights for the swearing-in ceremony? And just how expensive were the hors d’oeuvres at the Neighborhood Ball?
Just ask Ellen Kim.
During the presidential campaign, the 27-year-old former investment banker served as the budget manager for Obama’s paid media team, tracking its spending on media time and production, polling, direct mail and internet advertising. During the inauguration, she helped manage the spending on all of the festivities.
Kim, a graduate of both MIT and Stanford Business School, had no previous campaign experience, but a school connection and a quick phone interview landed her a spot on the 12-member team. “I thought it would be a unique, exciting and special experience to be at the forefront of an important presidential election, and it certainly was,” she explains.
From the Obama headquarters in downtown Chicago, Kim oversaw seven unique budgets, along with the payment processing for everything from hundred-dollar internet ads to multi-million-dollar TV time slots.
Because the campaign did not accept public financing, the team had no limits on how much money it could raise and spend. This kept Kim on her toes. “If we raised the funds, we aimed to spend them,” she says.
As her responsibilities come to an end, Kim relishes in the afterglow of her whirlwind journey.
“The greatest reward of the job was watching Barack Obama be sworn in as our 44th president and knowing I had a small part to do with it,” she says.
The Navy Fellow/Steven Lee
Long-term dedication to the military isn’t particularly common among Korean Americans, says U.S. Navy Commander Steven Lee, but the 38-year-old hopes to see that change with President Obama’s call for service.
“As someone who grew up in D.C., I’m sometimes cynical about politics, but this time around, you feel it’s different,” says Lee, who has lived in and around the D.C. area since emigrating from South Korea as a child. “I don’t think this country will ever be the same, in a positive way.”
Lee’s favorable comments toward Obama might surprise some who buy into the stereotype that servicemembers favor Republican administrations over Democratic ones because of the fear that the latter will reduce the defense budget.
But Lee says he believes the new president understands the nation’s military obligations abroad and will listen to senior military officials who want to “engage in a different [way], not just with a fist or military power, but with diplomacy.”
Such a balanced view suits the commander who currently serves as the Navy’s Federal Executive Fellow at the Brookings Institution, working as an intermediary between the policy world and the Navy. At the leading Washington, D.C. think tank, he conducts independent research on global maritime partnerships on behalf of the military.
After his service as a fellow concludes in 2011, Lee will assume command of a U.S. warship. He will become the first Korean American graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy to do so.
“I hope to see a lot more people that look like me in federal government and the military, in senior positions,” says Lee. “We have our first minority president. I’m sure people are now asking about the first Asian American president. So the door has been opened.”
The Messenger/Annabel Park
Innovative grassroots/netroots activist and filmmaker Annabel Park has just released her new YouTube documentary “9500 Liberty.” Jointly produced with her partner Eric Byler, this new feature film tackles the social and political tensions ignited by immigration in Prince William County, Va. Already generating a buzz, it has been featured by CNN and the Washington Post.
Self-described as a “bridge-builder,” Park worked as the national coordinator for 121 Coalition in 2007, a lobbying campaign to pass House Resolution 121, which called for redressing the human rights violations of Korean “comfort women” forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II.
In 2007, Park became active in the Obama campaign, creating a channel on YouTube called “United for Obama” to encourage first-, 1.5- and second-generation Korean Americans to elect the Democratic candidate. For first-generation Korean Americans, Park says, “it took a lot to get to know Obama, because they could not hear his speeches, and that is where you get the impact of Obama.”
Among the 1.5-er’s well-known YouTube films are “My Mom is a Born-Again Democrat,” in which she documented her mother’s personal journey from longtime Republican to Obama devotee.
Clogged freeways, greenhouse gases, alternative energy — these are some of the problems David S. Kim tackles as the deputy executive officer for Federal Advocacy and Government Relations at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It’s a mouthful, but it breaks down to serving as a lobbyist for the third largest transit provider in the nation. A native Californian, Kim has spent the last five years in D.C. working with Congress and two administrations on transportation policy.
Perfect timing for Kim, given that transportation policy, as the 45-year-old notes, goes “hand in hand with global warming, climate change, trying to reduce dependence on foreign oil” — all issues that the Obama administration will need to confront. Transportation is a key section of the current economic stimulus package.
Kim, married with two children, has served at various levels of state and federal government and is active in both the Korean and Asian American communities. He is a long-time member of the Korean American Coalition’s D.C. chapter, and at one time, served on the national board. Prior to his stint with the MTA, he served as acting deputy director in the Washington office of former California Governor Gray Davis.
The Interpreter/Cecilia Kang
Throughout the course of her prolific 15 years in journalism, Cecilia Kang has covered everything from the 1997 Asian financial crisis to the dotcom bust, the working poor in Seattle and the relationship between Korean grocers and Latino workers in northern Virginia. All of this experience culminated into one of the biggest opportunities of her life: covering the presidential elections and transition to an Obama administration from the epicenter of it all, Washington, D.C.
“I feel lucky to be in Washington in this time in history,” says the 35-year-old Kang, who now covers technology and policy for the Washington Post.
The Seattle native’s first job was as a copy editor at AP Dow Jones. She soon became the first Korean American to hold the post of bureau chief at the financial newswire’s Seoul office. After reporting stints in San Jose and Seattle, she was recruited by the Post in 2006.
For the past year, she has been writing about telecommunications policy decisions that she says have an immense impact on the industry’s bottom line and ultimately the consumers. “When President Obama speaks about making high speed internet a vehicle for job creation, suddenly this obscure thing I write about becomes a pillar of his economic recovery package,” she explains.
To keep up with the dark-suited power brokers in the capital, Kang does her fair share of breakfast meetings. She often leafs through tome-length legal briefs and clocks in at committee meetings. “When you find that tiny footnote that has the information you’re looking for, it’s a Eureka moment,” says Kang, who regularly scoops her competition.
The School Bully/Michelle Rhee
When KoreAm first spoke to Michelle Rhee as she stepped into her new post as chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, little did we know she’d become a national crusader, the woman Time magazine would later call “the most revolutionary — and polarizing — force in American education.”
Since Rhee was appointed to head the mostly African American district in June 2007, the 39-year-old double-Ivy-League grad has fired hundreds of teachers, principals and administrators, and has closed 23 underattended schools. She says it’s all in the name of her mission: to turn the troubled school system into the country’s “highest-performing” district.
While critics have called her methods “misguided” and “reckless,” supporters — which include Barack Obama and John McCain, both who tried to claim her as their own during their presidential campaigns — have praised her tough, no-nonsense approach and willingness to tackle the most “untouchable” issues.
“Whatever she says, I’m behind,” film director Spike Lee told the popular website DCist. “We need radical thinking, the same okie-doke isn’t going to get it. For kids, no education, and you’re dead.”
The Lens/Hyungwon Kang
Hyungwon Kang has flown on Air Force One. Many times.
“It’s overrated,” says the 45-year-old photographer and editor for Reuters, the world’s largest international multimedia news agency.
Kang isn’t being glib about his flight-time with former President George W. Bush. He’d just rather talk about capturing the image of the North Korean ajuma, who out of desperation during the 1997 famine, was harvesting vegetables in her front yard, or shooting the photo of 18-year-old Edward Lee lying dead with a bloodied T-shirt on the streets of Koreatown, the first Korean American casualty of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
“If photojournalists don’t record history as it’s happening, then future generations will be deprived of that knowledge,” says Kang. “There’s a heavy responsibility that comes with this job.”
And the weight of that responsibility literally used to be more than 30 pounds heavier. The 27-year veteran of photojournalism recalls carrying 50 pounds worth of camera equipment with him when he traveled to South Korea to shoot labor protests in the late 1980s, the pre-digital days, for Time magazine.
Kang, who emigrated from South Korea at age 13, discovered the camera after a fluke suggestion by a favorite high school teacher who also moderated the yearbook. A natural visual storyteller, he would go on to land an internship and then a job at the Los Angeles Times. Later, he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for the Times’ coverage of the L.A. riots.
In 1997, Kang moved to Washington, D.C., where he again was part of a Pulitzer-winning team that covered then-President Clinton’s impeachment trial for the Associated Press. The married father of three joined Reuters in 2001 and boasts security clearance from the White House, Congress and the Pentagon.
The Politico/Mark Keam
In his early 20s, Mark Keam moved to Washington, D.C. to intern for the Democratic National Committee. “At that time,” Keam says, “if someone had said, ‘In 20 years, 150 [Korean Americans] from all across the country will gather to celebrate the election of our first African American president,’ I would have thought that they were smoking something.”
Keam, now 42, was addressing a group of Korean American Democrats (and some Republicans, too), who’d converged at Yee Hwa Restaurant in Washington, D.C., last month for a pre-inauguration celebration dinner. In two days, Barack Obama would become the 44th president.
And Keam helped to make it happen.
Starting in 2007, Keam worked as a grassroots organizer on the Obama campaign trail, knocking on doors and running phone banks in Virginia for more than a year. He also campaigned for Obama during his 2004 Senate run. “I know Barack,” adds Kim, based in Vienna, Va., “and he asked me to help.”
Keam is the former aide to Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and also worked for the Clintons as the assistant chief counsel in the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Now a lobbyist for Verizon, the married father of two is a strong believer in Obama’s message for change. For the well-connected Democrat, it’s also a philosophy that just might help him win a seat of his own. Keam is running in the Democratic primary for Virginia’s 35th House of Delegates District (Fairfax County). Election day is June 9.
Before Keam announced his campaign, members of his party kept encouraging him to run. “We are a very white community,” Keam says of Fairfax. “But now, the mantra is, ‘Hey, we just elected the first black president, it’s time to not elect the typical white guys all the time!’ What’s happening in Virginia is a microcosm of what happened with the Obama campaign. We want change. People started telling me, ‘You should run! You’re like Obama. You’re unique. And that’s a good thing.’”
What could be cooler than working for the Mint? Well, for David L. Kim, who used to collect coins as a child, it doesn’t get any better than this. Since 2006, he has served as chief of staff at the U.S. Mint, the largest of its kind in the world.
An agency of the U.S. Department of Treasury, the Mint is charged with producing an adequate volume of circulating coinage for the nation to conduct its trade and commerce. It also sells coins to collectors. In 2007, the Mint produced more than 15 billion coins and contributed $825 million in earnings to the U.S. Treasury.
“Fort Knox is under our jurisdiction as well, so we guard and protect the nation’s gold reserves,” notes Kim, recruited by U.S. Mint Director Edmund C. Moy.
Formerly a 15-year veteran at Anheuser-Busch, where he was the director of Asian marketing and community relations, Kim is no stranger to public service and has served on several boards of various Asian American community groups. Presently, he chairs the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies, which provides government-related internship opportunities for APA college students.
Kim says his current job is a “dream come true.” He describes a new gold coin unveiled by the Mint that was originally designed in 1907 by a sculptor under the direction of President Theodore Roosevelt. There are only two original Double Eagle coins, housed in the Smithsonian. The Mint took the coin plasters and, through digital mapping, has recreated them. “It’s a gold piece that many people consider the most beautiful coin in the world,” says Kim.
When asked if the coin, with a $20 denomination, can be used as money, Kim is taken aback by the question. The coin collector in him responds: “Why would anyone want to?”
