John Chiang is the no-drama candidate for governor in the Trump era, and you're probably saying his name wrong
It took decades for John Chiang to hustle into the top ranks of California politics, and he relished all the schmoozing along the way.
On Lunar New Year, Chiang turned up at a firecracker party in Westminster. Weeks later, he woke early for a cattlemen’s breakfast in Sacramento. When the Fresno Rotary Club sought a luncheon speaker, Chiang made time.
His nonstop networking has paid dividends. He won five elections in a rout, most recently in 2014 for state treasurer.
Yet to many Californians, Chiang is just a vaguely familiar name, often mispronounced. (It’s Chung, not Chang.) It shows up on ballots, somewhere near the middle.
But now that he’s running for governor, Chiang is competing on a much bigger stage. Voters pay close attention to the top of the ticket, appraising character and personality.
For the first time in his career, the way that Chiang’s reserved, low-key demeanor comes off on television will matter — all the more so in a race against fellow Democrats Antonio Villaraigosa and Gavin Newsom, two of the state’s most charismatic politicians.
A strait-laced finance man, Chiang, 55, dismissed the former mayors of Los Angeles and San Francisco as “stylish” — more showhorse than workhorse.
Chiang, who lives in a condo around the corner from a South Bay mall, wears baggy suits from Nordstrom Rack. He called himself “Torrance stylish,” then burst out laughing.
“I’m quite OK with being a season behind,” he said.
At a time of constant drama in the Trump White House, Chiang hopes that Californians will turn to a more ordinary style of leadership, as they did when they elected Gray Davis governor a generation ago.
His manner can come off as unpolished. Chiang, unlike his nimble opponents, can get mired in explaining the likes of “surplus money investment pools” — not surprising for a onetime high school mathlete who majored in finance and won election to California’s Board of Equalization on his way up to state controller and treasurer.
“He’s sort of an accidental politician,” said Michael Genest, who was state finance director under Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Chiang has already banked nearly $9 million for the governor’s race, ensuring he’ll have plenty to spend on ads before the June 2018 primary.
For now, he is playing up his defiant streak. In 2008, when he was controller, he refused to obey Schwarzenegger’s order to cut the pay of state workers to minimum wage until lawmakers passed a budget.
“I was the last person standing, and I said, ‘Gov. Schwarzenegger, you don’t do that to 200,000 good people,’ ” Chiang told union leaders at a labor gathering last month in Orange County.
In 2011, Chiang enraged legislators by docking their pay during another budget impasse, saying they’d breached a law that punishes them for late spending plans. He boasts that friends in the Legislature stopped talking to him.
“It made me the most unpopular person in Sacramento,” Chiang told a crowd in Anaheim.
Critics see a pattern of crass opportunism. “It’s all about what’s best for himself and what will generate headlines — not what’s best for the state,” said Matt David, a Republican strategist who was deputy chief of staff to Schwarzenegger.
The son of immigrants from Taiwan, Chiang grew up with three younger siblings in Palos Heights, Ill. His father was a plastics engineer, his mother a full-time parent.
They were the first Asian family to move into the mainly white upscale Chicago suburb in the 1960s, when Chiang was just starting grade school. He recalls rampant bigotry — taunts, fights, vandalism and “ugly racial epithets.” It left him feeling isolated but taught him empathy.
“The hurt goes deep,” he said. “It makes me who I am.”
At home, Chiang’s parents spoke mostly English, but also Taiwanese Hokkien, Mandarin and Japanese. Every few years, the family would visit relatives in Taiwan, which was under Japanese occupation when Chiang’s parents were children.
Chiang remembers his mother cooking delicious Chinese food for his school lunches. But to fit in, he begged her to switch to American sandwiches, preferably on Wonder bread.
“I was petrified bringing lunch to school,” Chiang said. “Everybody had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
At 12 years old, he was captivated by the Watergate hearings. “All I knew is the president lied, and he had secret tapes, and it was like, ‘Oooooh, the president has secret tapes.’ ”
He was stunned by the prominence of a Japanese American, Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, in the congressional investigation of President Nixon. It was a jarring counterpoint to the racism in his own neighborhood.
“You’re just trying to get dignity and respect, and you’re thinking, ‘Oh, how did that guy get to be a United States senator?’ ”