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For someone who has always believed you should never feel sorry for a politician — after all, they begged for the job — last Monday’s debate on Hawaii News Now evoked at least some sympathy for the amount of public testing we are willing to inflict on the political class.
I’m assuming that the TV station was unable to get a permit to hold the debate on the Nuuanu Pali overlook, because it would be the only location worse than having a live TV debate outdoors on the Kamehameha Schools campus, halfway up the Koolau Mountains in the Kapalama Heights area known for nighttime rain.
The rain-smeared, wind-tossed candidates showed why professional television studios are air-conditioned and come with roofs.
Couldn’t Kamehameha, which was co-sponsoring the debate along with the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, have scored some lecterns or desks with chairs for the candidates? The impossibly high stools were precarious at best and some of the shorter candidates, like U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, were left with their legs dangling in the air. This debate was not Hawaii News Now’s first rodeo; they are capable of delivering a better product.
That said, the candidate all should have done better.
The most glaring flub belonged to state Sen. Donna Mercado Kim, running in the 1st Congressional District Democratic primary. She asked former congressman Ed Case how many times he was absent for votes when he served in Congress from 2003 to 2006, claiming it was 48 percent.
“That is absolutely incorrect,” Case shot back to Kim. “I don’t know where you got that. Donna, go check your facts.”
The official tally provided by congressional record keepers was 148 of 2,435 roll call votes, about 6 percent.
The next day Kim issued a statement saying, “I apologize to Mr. Case and the public for the confusion with the percentages.” For someone like Kim, who prides herself on her cross-examination skill in legislative hearings, the attack on Case seemed like much more than just “confusion with percentages.”
The first debate set of the night belonged to Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor. It is an elective office, but with little constitutional or statutory oomph — basically it is up to the office holder to make it dance. So the best remark in that debate came from former school board member Kim Coco Iwamoto, who when asked if she could get along with gubernatorial candidates David Ige and Colleen Hanabusa showed she had her dancing shoes ready.
“I can work with either governor. I can work around either governor,” Iwamoto said.
When Ige and Hanabusa finally got a chance to talk, it was already 9 p.m. and the invited crowd had dwindled to a bit more than a dozen.
The two each had something predictably nasty to say about the other, but the castigation was so tepid, both challengers fell flat.
Hanabusa went after Ige for scaring the daylights out of the state by waiting 38 minutes to explain the alert was a drill and no enemy missile was inbound. She offered this up like it was new news instead of something that has been rehashed for more than half a year, long enough to have already spawned a documentary film. If Hanabusa had offered up a vigorous or incisive accounting of all the other fumbles from Ige’s administration during that communication crisis, it would have at least put new wood on the fire.
As for Ige, he finally got his big chance to go negative and attack Hanabusa’s sponsorship of a tax credit for an aquarium at Ko Olina and how it was or wasn’t part of a real estate deal for Hanabusa’s husband. Unfortunately for Ige, Hanabusa had enough political jujitsu left to flip the issue into her concern for sponsoring needed West Oahu development in an area of high unemployment.
In many ways, the first big debate of the political season was not the night when the stars came out.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.
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