Political iconoclast Ed Case was back in the media spotlight on primary-election night, but not because he was running for office.
The Democrat who stunned Hawaii’s ruling establishment by challenging Daniel Akaka in the 2006 U.S. Senate primary was on the air as a commentator, sharing insights from decades in politics, learned winning and losing along the way.
Case lost that 2006 race, although later events highlighted the wisdom of his call for a smooth transition. Hawaii lost all its seniority in December 2012, with Akaka’s retirement and the death of Daniel Inouye.
Now senior vice president and chief legal officer for Outrigger Enterprises Group, a kamaaina hospitality company that is adding hotels around the world, Case revels in a working environment that spans 10,000 miles and 10 time zones.
Case, who was born and raised on the island of Hawaii, earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Williams College and a law degree from the University of California’s Hastings College of Law before coming home to embark on his legal and political career, which culminated with a 2002-2007 stint in Congress, after eight years in the state House.
He challenged Akaka rather than seek re-election to his U.S. House seat, a decision Case has long since stopped second-guessing.
"Idon’t live and die by what was, or what could have been," he said. "I can do something about today and tomorrow."
Besides work, the to-do list includes traveling with wife Audrey; they have four grown children between them. Don’t look for Case’s pithy commentary on the TVnews come general-election night; he’ll be in vacationing in Peru.
"I follow politics very closely," Case said. "But I wouldn’t give up this trip."
Question: How difficult has it been moving out of politics and into private enterprise?
Answer: Not particularly difficult. … I’ve had a unique dual career, really. I practiced law downtown for 30 years other than for that four years in Congress. Obviously, I had a full political career throughout that period. … The realms of government, politics and private enterprise have always been my life. And coming to Outrigger was really fantastic; that made it that much easier because I love being here. …
Q: Seeing how things have shaken out for Hawaii (in the U.S. Senate) … I imagine you feel vindicated in some sense. But is there also a sense of regret that maybe if you had just waited and played by rules of local politics you’d be in one of those seats?
A: Well, first of all, I’m always going to miss politics. It was a major part of my life and it still is. But that doesn’t mean I should be in it right now. I feel like I’m where I should be right now. So I have no regrets about my political career. I regret that the ’06 Senate campaign as it turned out effectively ended my political career and I regret that I lost valued friendships in that process. I don’t regret offering the voters a transition choice.
I think we would be better off with a senator of eight years seniority today. But the voters weighed that and made their decision. Democracy is mercifully swift. …
Q: You said you’re still involved in politics but you also said that the 2006 race effectively ended your political career, so a two-part question: How are you involved in politics today, beyond commentating, and do you foresee yourself coming back in as a candidate?
A: Well, I meant only in the sense that I pay a lot of attention to it. … Politics is still something that I follow closely, it’s something that I care very much about and I’m very interested in how things unfold. But my direct participation has been pretty limited. … I enjoyed the commentating just because I believe that the more understandable politics is to folks, even with all of its imperfections, the more people will get involved and vote, which is one of my major motivations.
As to what might happen down the road, I don’t intend to become involved actively at all while I’m at Outrigger and I hope to be here a long time. So it’s not even a consideration today, but who knows what’s going to happen in the future.
Q: What sort of political trends do you see in Hawaii?
A: We’re obviously going through a generational shift. … It’s really been oversimplified to the pre-Inouye/post-Inouye era.
What it’s really about is whether the influence of the generation that started the 1954 Democratic revolution will continue to be the primary influence in Hawaii politics, or whether there will be more diversity. … Much of what that generation brought is good for Hawaii. … But I think that perhaps one of the downsides of that generation was a closed-loop political system which shut out too much other thought and other candidates.
One of the results was that Hawaii effectively lost a generation of leadership. …
Q: Talking about voter turnout, what does that say about us in Hawaii, that turnout is so low? That we’re satisfied with how things are? Or that we’re just apathetic?
A: … I wish I had the answer to that because it’s something that I’ve never understood, my entire career.
There is nothing whatsoever that is fundamentally different about Hawaii that should lead to lower voter turnout. I don’t buy the sun-and-surf argument.
I do buy that it’s a little bit of the chicken-and-the-egg situation. When you have a relatively closed political system where there’s not a whole bunch of choice, people tend to think that their vote doesn’t count. We have to break through that somehow. You can do it with some mechanisms that we should have adopted a long time ago and still haven’t. … Mail-in voting is just one example. …
Q: What about money in politics? … What do you think about the Citizens United ruling (that opened the floodgates to Super PAC campaign spending) … ?
A: Citizens United materially worsened politics in our country, especially at the federal level. …
And to get back to your question about trends, I do see, especially at the national level, an incredible, deepening partisan divide. … When the far left and the far right are substantially overrepresented in Congress and the moderate middle, whether Democrat or Republican, is substantially absent, that’s a real concern. Citizens United tends to contribute to that, because you just don’t have many Super PACS who are saying, ‘Hey, let’s go moderate.’
I don’t think Congress has spent enough time on trying to be inventive about how to solve Citizens United. Let’s not forget that all the people in Congress have received the benefit of that money, so there’s a conflict of interest there.
Q: Shifting gears to your current role, what do you think are the pressing issues in Hawaii right now?
A: The biggest challenge for the tourism industry is complacency. We’ve been at the top of the heap for so long. We are among the world’s most iconic destinations, one of the most successful in the world. And the simple fact is that people tend to take that for granted, to assume that just because it’s been this way it will continue this way.
Outrigger has 14 properties in six countries outside of Hawaii, including Guam, Fiji, Thailand and Mauritius. We’re going to announce some more acquisitions pretty soon. So we know what the competition is like, and it’s fierce. If we’re not careful it will eat us up.
That’s our No. 1 concern around here, constantly reminding people that we have to strive every day to deliver the product and the service that people are looking for. That’s what we do at Outrigger every single day, all our employees. We’re all trying to make sure that we stay ahead of the competition. Because otherwise we will slump.
Q: One of the big challenges obviously has been homelessness. … (There are critics who say) that the hotel industry, airlines, the whole tourist industry, should be contributing more to solving Hawaii’s homeless problem — ideas like turning over a hotel that can be converted to Housing First, or devoting money to a dedicated fund. … What’s your response?
A: We pay an incredible amount of taxes. Property taxes, transient accommodations taxes, general excise taxes. We’re one of the largest tax payers, both Outrigger specifically and the tourism industry overall, so we feel that generally we are contributing.
But we don’t think that our contributions should stop there. We contribute, for example, through the Waikiki Improvement Association; the Housing First initiative is one example. …
Q: I wanted to get back to that idea of avoiding complacency in the tourism industry. … How serious a risk is that really?
A: It’s absolutely a risk. When you are 2,500 miles from the nearest landfall you think a lot about the number of airplanes that are traveling here, and as a result you think about things like energy and consolidation in the airline industry. You worry about ease of travel to Hawaii and whether the surge … in Chinese visitor outbound can reach Hawaii. From China, and from India too.
Q: We’ve been hearing for years that the Chinese market will bring a huge influx. Do you see that?
A: It’s still a small segment of Hawaii tourism but it is growing at one of the most rapid rates of any segment. …
But if you take a look, for example, at our Thailand properties, Chinese participation in our Thailand properties is 25 percent-plus at this point, and growing rapidly.
Q: Because they can get there easier?
A: They can get there easier, they are familiar with flying there, they have a longer track record of having gone there. So we take the risks very seriously. …
We worry that when it is reported that the tourist industry is enjoying a record year, that people forget that in the last 20 years we’ve had three very, very serious downturns. …
Q: It’s a cyclical industry.
A: Yes. You cannot judge it at any one point, you’ve got to judge it over time.
You’ve got to work at it constantly to keep that healthy market share. You have to reinvent yourself.
We worry about the inventory and infrastructure in Waikiki, where we’ve seen a 20 percent decline in hotel rooms in the last 15 years, roughly. …
For us, it is constantly a matter of reaching out to our counterparts in government, the private sector and in the community to provide our perspective and maintain support for tourism all the time.
Q: Sounds like you’re really enjoying this job.
A: I think what I’m particularly passionate about at Outrigger … is the fact that this 66-year-old, born-and-raised in Hawaii company has not only done so well in Hawaii but is now out there in the world competing against the largest and most influential hospitality companies in the world. …
As people look at the players in the tourism industry, my hope is that they view Outrigger not only as a very successful Hawaii company … but also one that is trying to make Hawaii a better place. …
I think that those of us who go into politics are hard-wired to give back. So if it was not meant to be for me in the political arena, I’m very happy that I’ve found another place to do it.
