John Liu won the Democratic Primary by just 202 votes before going on to win by a wide margin in the general election This year, John Liu, the first Asian American citywide elected official in New York City, is considered the favorite by most observers in the Democratic Primary on Sept. 9. He has backing from Democratic Party leaders and his opponent, Isaac Sasson, is a relative neophyte in electoral politics. But the campaign has not been without incident. A controversy erupted this summer when Sasson's supporters in the Sephardic Voter's League distributed campaign literature that called on constituents to vote against the "Oriental candidates" in the race. "I think it is a racial appeal and quite frankly not anything new that I've had to deal with in my lifetime," Liu said. "These kinds of attacks against Asians will unfortunately not disappear overnight. Our job is to eliminate them as soon as possible." While racial and ethnic appeals in New York City politics are notoriously common, racial references to APAs in Flushing, Queens are particularly sensitive. Flushing's previous councilmember, Julia Harrison, set off a firestorm in 1996 when she grumbled to The New York Times that Asian immigrants "were more like colonizers than immigrants." (Source: Tomio Geron, AsianWeek, Sept. 05, 2003).