It’s time for Hirono to stop hiding behind her mother

Boxing great Joe Louis said you can run but you can’t hide in the ring.

U.S. Rep. Mazie Hirono seems determined to prove him wrong by running for the U.S. Senate while hiding from serious engagement with her Demo­cratic primary opponent, former U.S. Rep. Ed Case.

Hirono has ducked most invitations for live, televised debates, agreeing only to five joint appearances that were cherry-picked for tame formats and limited TV exposure.

She rejected debates sponsored by the major media on commercial TV, where she’d face the greatest viewership and toughest questioning.

You can’t fault Hirono for dismissing Case’s original proposal for dozens of debates, which would test the attention span of the most dedicated voters.

But rough-and-tumble debates on live TV provide the most convenient way for voters to compare candidates, and a couple in each the primary and general election cycles has become the norm for major races.

Hirono instead will use the huge bankroll she’s amassed with the help of U.S. Sen. Daniel Ino­uye to bombard the airwaves with controlled ads.

In the strangest twist of the debate over debates, Hirono responded to Case’s latest call for her to come out of hiding by dubiously accusing him of attacking her mother.

All Case said was that voters are aware by now of their oft-repeated personal stories — hers as an immigrant from Japan raised by a single mother; his as a son of a multigenerational Hawaii family.

He suggested they move beyond identity politics and provide voters a chance to compare them on issues and their rec­ords in Congress.

Nothing he said could reasonably be taken as derogatory to her mother, but Hirono whined that he "crossed the line that we do not cross in Hawaii" and demanded that he "leave my mother out of it."

This from a candidate who brings her mother into virtually every speech she gives.

To accuse an opponent of denigrating her mother when he did nothing of the kind is the cheapest kind of politics.

The most overheated rhetoric in this campaign so far has come from Hirono and her surrogates.

Her suggestion that Case was un-local for mentioning her mother was more incendiary than anything he said in the statement she cited.

And her camp repeatedly paints a cartoonish picture of Republican Linda Lingle as a lackey of Sarah Palin and Karl Rove who would destroy Social Security, wage war on women and hand the country to the rich.

In her weekend speech to the Demo­cratic convention, Hirono described Lingle as "anti-family, anti-workers, anti-unions, anti-keiki, anti-Native Hawaiians."

She can’t seriously expect to get away with dishing out trash talk like that and then run crying to mommy when opponents challenge her to answer for her own rec­ord.

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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.