With Election Day looming, candidates off and running

Three major players in the state Senate closed out the 27th Hawaii Legislature with plans that could be shaping the political future of Hawaii for decades to come.

As the obligatory "Hawaii Aloha" was being sung Thursday, the Senate president and the Ways and Means chairman slipped their political campaigns into gear, and the Judiciary chairman stepped up his analysis of his political future.

All three are pros with years of experience, so all three are making 2014 the year for major changes.

Senate President Donna Kim does not have to leave the Senate to run for the open 1st Congressional District seat, so her political future is more assured.

Polls now have Kim ahead of her closest Democratic primary opponent, state Rep. K. Mark Takai, but the short political season is just starting.

"I’m all in and running full gear," Kim said on closing day.

Because the race is a sprint, voting will start in less than 100 days and the field is crowded, name recognition is a significant part of the contest.

Kim is a somewhat conservative Democrat who for nearly three decades has represented what is the very cradle of Hawaii’s Democratic Party — Kalihi — and is well known.

In an unprecedented honor, the Senate spent much of its last floor session piling leis and accolades on David Ige, who has been an instrumental player in expanding the state’s education policies and shaping a cautious financial plan.

After 29 years in the Legislature, Ige declared he is a candidate for governor and is vacating his Senate seat.

In his last Senate speech, Ige, an electrical engineer and the very definition of the chess-playing computer nerd, started by recalling the difficulties of using the Legislature’s primitive computers when he was first appointed to fill a legislative vacancy in 1986.

"We knew we had to create access, and this was before the Internet … So we committed to electronic access and the public, for the first time, would be guaranteed that when the Legislature was voting on measures, the public would have full access to all of the materials in real time," Ige said.

The Pearl City Democrat now goes to do battle with incumbent Democratic Gov. Neil Abercrombie in what appears to be a lopsided contest.

While last week Abercrombie was holding a $2,000-a-ticket Kahala fundraiser to bolster his $4 million campaign, Ige was saying he was confident he can win even without the funds needed to run TV commercials.

If that is a fairly quixotic challenge, Sen. Clayton Hee, who has also served both in the Senate and the state House and as an Office of Hawaiian Affairs trustee, is reported to be mulling over both running for re-election or running for lieutenant governor.

While Hee, the sometimes fiery Judiciary Committee chairman, has a looming general-election battle against conservative GOP state Rep. Richard Fale, he has been rumored to be exploring a race against Lt. Gov. Shan Tsutsui.

Hee has run unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor and Congress, so he knows that there would be a lot of risk in waiting so late to start a statewide campaign for LG.

The lure for Hee is that Tsutsui has so far run an extremely low-profile campaign and assumed his current position only after former Lt. Gov. Brian Schatz was named by Abercrombie to fill the remaining two years of U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye’s term.

Time is running out for Hee to say if he is all in for either race, but with more than $400,000 in his campaign treasury, he can make a strong impact.

If any of the three senators get in, it makes over Hawaii’s political future, opens the state Senate to more change and proves the power of legislative experience.

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