From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Trouble in Paradise
Elections in Hawaii may not be a luau for Democrats.
The popular 1970s police drama "Hawaii Five-O" showcased the nation's 50th state and attracted millions of tourists to its shores. This year, political reporters have been trooping to Hawaii to see if the entrenched 40-year-old Democratic Party machine--dubbed "Hawaii Four-O"--will finally lose a race for governor and open up the Aloha State's politics.
When Hawaii became a state in 1959, it had been ruled for decades by a tiny Republican elite of sugar and pineapple plantation owners. That soon changed as Democrats, mostly led by Japanese-American war veterans like Sen. Daniel Inouye, gradually gained power. In 1962 voters gave William Quinn, the state's first--and last--Republican governor, the boot. Since then, only two Republicans have been elected to Congress or statewide office in Hawaii.
That many change this year. Republican Linda Lingle, the former mayor of Maui, is running for governor and is favored in the polls. When she ran four years ago she led in polls for most of the campaign only to lose by 5,254 votes to incumbent Gov. Ben Cayetano. Despite a host of malfunctioning voting machines and credible allegations of illegal aliens voting, a recount confirmed Mr. Cayetano as the winner.
Since then the political environment has changed. Hawaii's economy has continued in "a semi-permanent recession," according to the Grassroots Institute of Hawaii, a new free-market think tank. An Internal Revenue Service probe exposed that the Bishop Estate, a secretive charitable trust that owns one out of every 12 acres in Hawaii, was employing 10 teams of people to draft bills for lawmakers, steer contributions to politicians and investigate critics.
The marginalization of critics is one reason the Democratic machine has survived for four decades. Ed Medeiros, owner of the Aloha Flea Market, saw his site on the grounds of a state-owned sports stadium taken over by the government after he openly campaigned for Ms. Lingle. Lowell Kalapa, head of the state's Tax Foundation, was removed from a state tax-review commission he had co-founded after criticizing the state's fiscal policy. Sam Slom, one of only three Republicans in the state Senate, was put through a full-fledged ethics investigation for using a press release sent out on his personal stationery tweaking the governor about his purchase of a $1 million house lot in Mr. Slom's district.
Media critics have also felt the machine's sting. Malia Zimmerman, a reporter for Pacific Business News, was fired in 2000 after the governor filed a complaint with the state's Media Council over one of her stories. The story, which was accurate, was about a leaked report of the governor's own Small Business Task Force that found a pattern of retribution and intimidation of business owners by state agencies. This February she started up a news Web site called HawaiiReporter.com (motto: "Freedom to Report the Real News") that has already become the state's alternative source for hard-hitting political news and a frequent source for talk-radio hosts.
HawaiiReporter has had a lot to chew on lately. Rep. Patsy Mink, a veteran of the 1960s Democratic takeover of the state, died on Sept. 28, after the state's deadline to name a replacement for her on the November ballot. Allegations swept through political circles that party officials had concealed the grave nature of Ms. Mink's illness until key election deadlines had passed.
Gov. Cayetano promptly moved to ignore state law and asked the courts to authorize a snap special election on Nov. 5 for the unexpired portion of Mink's term. When told there were technical as well as legal problems preventing this, Mr. Cayetano's response was brusque: "I'm really tired of hearing this kind of talk. If the court says we can hold this election on Nov. 5, then the elections office better be ready to print up some ballots and if they have to count manually then they should do it. Just do it. Don't tell me it can't be done." The courts ignored this imperious request as well as a later one that Mink's name be replaced on the ballot by a Democrat handpicked by the party. Gwendolyn Mink, the late congresswoman's daughter, denounced all the maneuvering as "a move, again, to change the rules in the middle of the game."
The Democratic machine did prove its agility in last month's primary for governor. It featured Lt. Gov. Mazie Hirono, a colorless supporter of the status quo, and state Rep. Ed Case, a cousin of AOL chairman Steve Case. Ed Case ran on an unabashed reform platform, calling for greater transparency in government, reform of the state's collective-bargaining system and modest privatization of services. Unions vowed to defeat Mr. Case and cranked up their get-out-the-vote efforts. Ms. Hirono eked out a victory, 41% to 40%. Unions also targeted four Democratic state senators who had broken ranks and supported privatization and a cutback in public workers' health benefits. They all lost to union-backed primary opponents.
The victory of dinosaur Democrats in the primary sets up a clear contrast in the November election with Ms. Lingle, who is running a more focused and tougher campaign than she did in 1998. Her platform is cautiously reform-minded: the expansion of charter schools, lower taxes, and a reduction in the state's 17,000 pages of business regulations. Lorraine Akiba, the Democratic Party chairman, is already warning voters that "Lingle and her crew are nothing but Bush Republicans trying to promote the national GOP agenda here in Hawaii."
But the Bush-bashing strategy may backfire. Even though Al Gore carried Hawaii by more than 18 percentage points, President Bush's popularity there soared after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the state may finally be in the mood for change, even if it comes from Republicans. Capturing the governorship after 40 years would go a long way to creating a viable two-party system in the state.
Columnist George Will calls the Hawaii governor "an American Caesar" in that he appoints the attorney general, every judge and all key regulators. Should Ms. Lingle win, she could easily develop a bench team of highly qualified future Republican candidates, something that doesn't exist now.
Sen. Inouye, the 78-year-old patriarch of the state's Democratic Party, senses that his party machine is now under great pressure. "We're fighting for our political lives!" he warned a recent state Democratic convention. At the 2000 party convention he even took note of a Wall Street Journal editorial comparing the Democratic domination of the state to New York's Tammany Hall and said party members should take such criticism seriously. "We cannot allow stupid and self-serving members of our party to tarnish our accomplishments," he said.
Next month, we will find out if Hawaii's notoriously complacent voters now believe there is truly trouble in paradise. Public discontent is higher than ever but so is cynicism that anything can change. Turnout was at an all-time low in the September primary, except among union and government workers who are often pushed to vote by absentee. The survival of the 40-year-old Democratic machine may depend on whether the state has gone so far down the road of big government that voters can't see themselves being weaned off of any of it.
