Neal Milner called it “the biggest political insurgency in Hawaiʻi since statehood.” He meant the 2014 governor’s race. That year, a little-known state senator named David Ige beat a sitting governor in the primary by 36 points.
Writing in Civil Beat this week, Milner wants more of that kind of politics in Hawaiʻi — more upstarts, more disruption, more of the sparks that fly when voters throw out the people running things.
Milner’s not wrong that Hawaiʻi elections have gotten dull. He’s wrong about what happened in 2014. The difference matters. The next time a challenger takes on a sitting official here, this is the story readers will reach for.
David Ige was not an upstart. He was the establishment, waiting.
By 2014, Ige had spent nearly 30 years in the legislature. He chaired the Senate Ways and Means Committee, which is a dull sounding but powerful position. Money bills pass through Ways and Means or they don’t pass at all.
Ige’s wife had built her career as a teacher and public school administrator. That made her a member of the two largest public sector unions: the Hawai‘i State Teachers Association and the Hawai‘i Government Employees Association. These unions and their retired members made up the core of the Democratic primary electorate. When Ige entered that race, he wasn’t kicking down a door. He already had a key.
Neil Abercrombie handed him the house.
Abercrombie arrived in the governor’s office in 2010 wanting to fix things that badly needed fixing. The state’s retirement system had been quietly bleeding money for decades. Its flawed design came from an earlier era: Now a schoolteacher could retire at 55 and live past 90, drawing benefits for longer than she’d worked. Someone eventually had to say so out loud. Abercrombie said it loudly, in his first legislative session.
The 2011 legislative season featured Abercrombie’s fixes. Workers had to pay an increased share of contributions. There was a tax on pension income and an end to paying pensioner Medicaid costs. There were also closed loopholes on overtime and the “high-three” rule, tricks civil servants had used to spike their pensions.
But Abercrombie made a mistake. He let the fix become his. His name got attached to the pension tax and to the retirement system overhaul. Ways and Means, chaired by a patient senator named David Ige, let the bills sit long enough to cement the association in voters’ minds, then killed them quietly in committee.
Abercrombie took the blame for proposing painful things. Ige took the credit for killing them.
A wiser politician might have survived even these furious constituencies. But Abercrombie found room to fit several more in his stable of enemies.
He called a special legislative session to legalize same-sex marriage — an act of conviction that cost him badly with religious voters. He passed over Colleen Hanabusa for the U.S. Senate seat Dan Inouye had asked her to fill on his deathbed, straining a relationship with the Japanese American base that had anchored Hawaiʻi Democratic politics for two generations. He also picked a funding fight over the Pro Bowl, like a linebacker rushing off the field to sack the water boy.
When reporters pressed Abercrombie on his combative style, he offered the line that still makes press secretaries wince a decade later: “I’m not your pal. I’m not your counselor. I am the governor.”
Abercrombie’s political instincts were honed on the University of Hawaiʻi campus in the heady 1970s. He then worked for decades as a legislator, often serving as a vocal minority, a role he played well. His fundamental posture was opposition, and this temperament was unsuited to executive office.
Getting elected as governor requires piecing a coalition together. This means promising everything to everyone, but it also means choosing which groups will form the base. Smart special interests will know from a candidate’s platform which groups they favor. And smarter special interests will ensure loyalty by placing trusted personnel close to the candidate.
A governor must be sensitive to stakeholders in our largest industries: tourism, the military, and construction. They have to show some willingness to work with organized labor. Even Lingle knew unions, having worked with the Teamsters and Hotel Workers. And a governor must blend this stakeholder management with public relations skill.
But after the election, governing means choosing among myriad goals.
Issues that resonate on the campaign trail are not always priorities in office. And not all issues can be addressed given time and resource constraints. Thus, a governor surveys the terrain and chooses a few destinations.
Then they must herd twenty-odd departments, count noses in the legislature, and curry public favor through the media. All this must be done while responding to the news cycle and natural disasters and scandals.
The governor must also watch his back. Ambitious legislators and even the lieutenant governor may try to stab him. The media sics their bloodhounds. And his executive actions may even be attacked in the courts.
It is a job akin to Moses leading murmuring Israel through the desert.
Abercrombie’s fiscal diagnosis was sound. But a governor isn’t called to diagnose the patient. He’s called to operate. However, operating takes more than skill with a blade. Abercrombie pulled out a bonesaw before administering anaesthetic, and the patient was understandably disturbed.
When the patient had a chance to leave the operating room, she did, seeking a second opinion.
Another surgeon offered to delay surgery, which sounds better than the bonesaw.
But the patient needed surgery. Arguably, the state still needs surgery to ensure its liabilities don’t outstrip its ability to pay.
Ige didn’t storm anything. He watched a talented, well-intentioned man dismantle his own coalition one constituency at a time, and then he picked up the pieces that were left. Calling that an insurgency flatters everyone involved. It makes Ige sound braver than he was, and it makes Abercrombie’s downfall sound like the triumph of a movement rather than a long series of his own unforced errors.
Labeling Ige as an insurgent also masks the overarching failure of his administration. Ige proved too patient while governing, to the point of inaction. Aside from memorable gaffes like forgetting his Twitter password during the missile alert crisis, Ige’s administration is notable for… nothing.
Ige hamstrung his administration within his first few months. He hung Carleton Ching out to dry as his nominee to head the Department of Land and Natural Resources. Ige did not predict the backlash Ching’s nomination would generate, and he did not secure the votes necessary to confirm him. The ordeal guaranteed that Ige would draw on a small talent pool for his remaining term in office.
Ige stalled the stadium, and he punted on TMT. He claims credit for Hawaiʻi’s health outcomes during the pandemic. But that owes more to our clean air than to any policy intervention.
Ige surrounded himself with a small, loyal circle of advisors, but he never seemed to grasp their limitations. Mike McCartney and Linda Chu Takayama were earnest, but not skilled enough to right the ship of state. And that’s to say nothing of Ford Fuchigami, who recently pleaded not guilty to bribery charges.
Ige at least could recognize his limits as a communicator, though it’s unclear why he did not bother with public speaking classes during his nearly 40-year career in public service. George Ariyoshi felt a similar insecurity, and he responded with practice and eventually became a competent public speaker.
Even where Ige should have excelled, he failed.
An engineer by training, Ige offered teachers a bit of fan service: a project to air condition 1,000 of the state’s school classrooms. But the Cool Classrooms Initiative ran over budget and didn’t reach the hottest classes in the state, according to an audit.
A quarter of the $100 million appropriated for the project went to external design consultants and firms. At the end of Ige’s eight years in office, students in many classrooms across the state were still sweltering.
Abercrombie was a man of the left, but the temptation that ruined him — boldness mistaken for a governing philosophy — has no party. It is simply what happens when someone convinced of his own rightness stops doing the slow, unglamorous work of building consent for his vision.
What can be said for Abercrombie is that he had a vision. Ige had none. There is nothing in his eight years as governor that suggests a coherent plan. Even his Hawaii 2.0 planning exercise died on the vine, perhaps because governors usually announce plans during their first two years in office, not their last two.
To position either man as an insurgent is to distort history.
Abercrombie and Ige prove that one can win election as governor of Hawaiʻi without the vision and temperament necessary to govern well.
Changing that will take more than an insurgency.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up here for our free Daily Edition newsletter.
