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16 Reasons Why Governor Linda Lingle is Doomed
Plus three reasons why she’ll probably win after all
by By Anthony Pignataro
October 12, 2006
1
It’s nearly impossible for working people making the average income
in Hawai`i to afford to buy a house. Yet mainland developers are making
a killing building condos, timeshares and estates for rich people to
use as vacation homes. For the first three years of her administration
Governor Linda Lingle did virtually nothing on affordable housing, and
now she’s doing little more than paying it lip service.
2
Lingle’s a Republican, and they’re none too popular these days: This
year Republican Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham of California pled
guilty to felony bribery; Bob Ney of Ohio pled guilty to felony
corruption; Mark Foley of Florida resigned after allegedly
inappropriate sexual contact with 16-year-old House pages; and, of
course, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas resigned to
fight charges alleging felony bribery and conspiracy. Now House Speaker
Dennis Hastert of Illinois looks like he’s in serious jeopardy since he
apparently knew a great deal about Foley’s problem for at least a year
before he bothered to do anything about it. In January, the scandals
involving uber-GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was convicted of fraud
and conspiracy, hit home when Lingle chose to give back the $4,000 in
campaign contributions she took from him. And then there’s President
George W. Bush, whose mindless prosecution of the Iraq War is turning
even retired army generals against him. Republicans across the country
are looking at what political science types call a “disaffected
base”—traditional GOP voters who just stay home on Election Day. For
Lingle, that’s not good.
3
Challenger Randy Iwase is a very smart guy who knows the issues.
Take this statement he recently sent out to the press on Oct. 5:
“Leadership in education is about providing the appropriate level of
funding for our public schools. Take for example the proposal in 2004
by this governor to cut 163 special education teaching positions
despite the fact that it would have caused the Department of Education
to violate the federal Felix consent order. Governor Lingle cut the
education budget proposed by the Board Education by 68 percent and only
asked for $40 million to fix our public schools despite a $500 million
backlog in school projects. That is not leadership in education!”
4
Republicans had low turnout in Hawai`i’s primary election, which is
likely to repeat in the general election. Lingle won her party’s
nomination on Sept. 23 with just 31,211 votes—less than half of what
she gathered in the 2002 primary. There were also 58,685 blank votes in
the Democratic race for governor. While Maui News City Editor Edwin
Tanji dismissed those in a recent column as probable Lingle
votes—though he provided no evidence to back up his assertion—state and
county Democratic Party officials instead see them as Democrats who
voted for Senator Daniel Akaka but didn’t know what to do in the
governor’s race. Now that the Democrats are lining up behind one
candidate, they see those blank votes as going to Iwase. When you add
all this to the fact that Lingle didn’t exactly blow out Mazie Hirono
back in 2002—Lingle’s margin of victory was a mere 4.5 percent, or just
17,362 of 376,656 votes cast—there’s ample reason to think the race
between Lingle and Iwase will be closer than many people think.
5
While it’s not the Lingle Administration’s fault that the Ka Loko
Dam on Kauai burst on March 14, killing seven people, it is the
administration’s fault that until the tragedy the state Department of
Land and Natural Resources failed to inspect any of the state’s many
earthen dams, the vast majority of which date to the old sugar
plantation days. Stuff like that makes a bitter mockery of Lingle’s
insistence that her administration “prepared for natural or man-made
emergencies.”
6
Iwase is a wily pol with extensive government experience. At various
times in his life he’s worked as a deputy Attorney General, Honolulu
City Councilman, Aloha Tower Development Corporation Executive
Director, State Senator (D, Mililani) and chairman of the Hawai`i Labor
and Industrial Relations Appeals Board. He’s ran in—and won—many
previous elections.
7
Iwase seemed much more vibrant, spirited and, well, alive during the
Oct. 6 Governor’s Debate. Iwase spoke passionately about the tough
times facing working people in the state, while Lingle looked dazed and
spoke in an emotionless monotone as she insisted the state was doing
fine and U.S. troops had to stay in Iraq until a “functioning
democracy” took over—a dream few dispassionate analysts say was ever
possible.
8
Homelessness is bad in Hawai`i and seems to be getting worse. Though
Lingle likes to say her administration “has cared” for homeless
people—in May 2006 she signed three bills spending $40 million on
homeless programs—the problem has been getting worse. In fact, one out
of every 50 people who live on the Wai`anae Coast is homeless.
“Considering a population of the Wai`anae Coast, which is a little
under 50,000, to have somewhat close to 800 or so homeless, that’s a
pretty high density,” Wai`anae Community Outreach coordinator Michael
Ullman said in the Aug. 31, 2006 Honolulu Advertiser. “It’s probably
one of the higher densities certainly in Hawai`i and probably in the
country.”
9
There are simply more Democrats in the state than Republicans.
10
In late September 2005, Lingle showed how she’s made state
government “more transparent, open and responsive” by completely
botching the 28th District state representative nomination. After
19-year legislator Kenneth Hiraki resigned to go shill for Hawaiian
Telcom, it fell on Lingle to replace him with another Democrat, as the
law requires. So she picked Bev Harbin, who not only wasn’t actually a
Democrat, but also had three convictions for writing bad checks in 1987
and owed $125,000 in back taxes. Lingle said she knew none of this when
she made the nomination, and ultimately called upon Harbin to resign,
which she naturally refused to do. In the Sept. 23 Primary Election,
authentic Democrat Karl Rhodes finally solved the problem Lingle
created by handily beating Harbin’s reelection bid.
11
Lingle often uses the argument that the state Legislature often
refuses to work with her administration, but she’s done her own bit to
bypass them. In late December 2005, state Auditor Marion Higa reported
that the Lingle Administration had created 934 jobs—$30 million
worth—within the executive branch without getting legislative
authorization by liberally interpreting hiring procedures. The
administration said they had to go around the Legislature to ensure
“flexibility,” but Higa didn’t buy it. “Since it’s the Legislature’s
responsibility to appropriate money,” Higa said in the Dec. 28, 2005
Honolulu Advertiser, “if they knew where this $30 million was, they
might have chosen to spend it in a different way.”
12
Lingle gives the impression that she cares more about the welfare of
her party than what’s best for the state. For instance, she knew all
about Republican state Representative Galen Fox’s (23rd District)
December 2004 arrest for allegedly fondling a woman sleeping next to
him on a flight from the Aloha State to LAX immediately after it
happened, but chose to say nothing. Well, not really nothing: in June
2005—four months before a judge eventually convicted Fox of misdemeanor
sex crime, forcing his resignation—Lingle told the Honolulu Advertiser
that Fox was “a thoughtful and strategic leader.”
13
Remember the Gasoline Price Cap? Yes, we all know it didn’t work—gas
prices in Hawai`i—and especially Maui—were high before the cap, during
the cap and after the cap got dropped. Lingle railed against it from
Day One, though she never offered any immediate solution to high prices
at the pump (her support for alternative fuel vehicles won’t amount to
anything for years). Through it all, her reelection campaign somehow
found the time to cash tens of thousands of dollars in contributions
from Big Oil.
14
William Aila, the Wai`anae Harbor Master who lost the Democratic
Party nomination for governor to Iwase, wasted no time in endorsing his
former rival. That move does a lot to reassure environmentalist
Democrats worried about Iwase’s pro-labor, pro-development background.
15
Lingle has spent an astonishing amount of time fundraising during
her term in office—and not just for her reelection effort. In the
spring of 2005, the state Legislative asked the state Ethics Committee
to look into Lingle’s many trade missions to Asia. Specifically, they
wanted to know why so many companies had paid a total of more than
$800,000 for trade missions. But the committee refused, saying they
could only act after receiving a complaint, which in this case they
never got.
16
Unlike Lingle, Iwase is so serious about appealing to young people
that he’s got his own MySpace page: www.myspace.com/iwase4gov. And he’s
got 169 friends! Now that’s not as many as, say, the Jim Rose Circus
(www.myspace.com/jimrosecircus), which has 12,715 friends, but it’s
still more than Linda Lingle who, the last time I checked, had zero
friends. MTW