In this campaign year, what is needed is a better way of rating candidates for office and their buddies already in office.

Issues are great, but your announced beliefs and values can carry you only so far.

To really follow a candidate or incumbent, we should know what they are worth.

Not so much what you get from a candidate, but how much it costs.

If you want to buy stock in Google, it costs about $574.92 for one share, which is down $1.60 from last week.

You can get your Google data from the stock market reports and draw a chart to see if Google is going up in value or down. Then you can overlay that chart with the information about Apple to see who is doing better and which company has the most value.

Imagine if we could do this with politicians.

Take Gov. Neil Abercrombie: His popularity has taken a big hit since he became governor, and his Cabinet is something of an ever-turning revolving door as directors and deputies appear to come and go with the seasons, but that lad can bring in the money.

If we could get daily updates on how much money a longtime politician like Abercrombie is raising, we could do away with the arbitrary public polling data.

Why ask voters if they approve or disapprove of Abercrombie’s job performance, if we could get a daily report on how much Abercrombie is selling for today and compare that to how much he sold for last year?

We could compare how much it costs to buy Abercrombie in relationship to how much it costs for stock in former lieutenant governor and Abercrombie opponent James "Duke" Aiona.

If you do away with the messy polling data that relies on the vagaries of public opinion, we could instead get down to hard numbers.

Cash is cash, and if it costs $1,000 to buy a ticket to a politician’s fundraiser and 100 people buy tickets, then you know that the dude is worth $100,000.

None of this deciphering whether Pearl City voters are more supportive than North Shore voters or if the candidate appeals to AJAs instead of Filipino-American voters.

Give me a daily update on how much they are raking in and we will know what they are worth.

Abercrombie, for instance, has raised $1,091,600 in the first six months of the year.

That should be good news if you have stock in Abercrombie. He is partners with Lt. Gov. Brian Schatz, and the state Campaign Spending reports show that Schatz has taken in $220,766.35 in the same time period.

What we don’t know is how much comes in on a daily basis. The spending commission data gives you data when the checks are reported, but you really don’t know when the checks were really written. The money is rolling in for much of the year, but it is collected only around fundraiser time.

If we had daily reporting requirements, the information would sound more like the stock market report.

"Abercrombie stocks closed lower for the seventh day out of the last eight on Monday after the two TV stations and a neighbor island newspaper reported that Hawaii consumers cut their spending last month," the report might read.

Political commentary would then become more like stock advice.

"Voters are ignoring reports that Abercrombie has more exposure to right-of-center political action groups than both Aiona and Mufi Hannemann, but are swayed by the Abercrombie operations, which are generating more than half of their return with appeals to University of Hawaii graduates and Obama Democrats," the report could say.

Instead of the marketplace of ideas, a marketplace of politicians will give us a market-driven winner.

———

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.