Gov. Neil Abercrombie savored the achievement.

On the afternoon in late March when the state House approved a $200 million settlement with the Office of Hawaiian Affairs over OHA’s share of revenue from former crown land, the governor, sitting in the gallery, shared a fist bump with former Gov. John Waihee.

The settlement transferred state-controlled land in Kakaako for OHA to redevelop and cleared a debt that was overdue since 1978. The bigger task — a global settlement of the Hawaiian share of former crown land — is still on the table, but the governor succeeded where others had not.

"This settlement shows that it can be done and gives them the basis for a viable governing structure with regard to land and money," Abercrombie said in an interview Friday. "What this will do is move Native Hawaiians from the category of victims into deciders of their own fate in the 21st century."

The OHA settlement, which moved through the Legislature unamended, was a major accomplishment in a productive second session for Abercrombie.

The governor also helped win passage of a bill that would create the regulatory framework for a $1 billion undersea cable to move energy between the islands. He urged the approval of bills that could reform the criminal justice system and reduce the number of prisoners housed on the mainland. He and his staff could not get state lawmakers to agree on performance evaluations for public school teachers, but his appointed Board of Education adopted an evaluation system.

The governor’s only significant policy setback was the decision by lawmakers not to immediately replenish the state’s hurricane relief and rainy day funds, which had been tapped to help close budget shortfalls during the economic downturn.

After an uneven first year and a staff shakeup, Abercrombie approached the 2012 Legislature with much more patience, personally appearing at committee hearings on his priority bills and dropping by the late-night conference meetings on the state budget. Although there were a few private missteps, the governor did not publicly insert himself into the clash between the House and Senate over state construction spending that delayed the budget and caused extended deadlines.

While the session was functionally positive, politically, the liberal Democrat may have further alienated the labor, environmental and progressive activists who are influential within the party. The disappointment from some on the left with Abercrombie and majority Democrats at the Legislature, particularly in the House, is palpable.

The Hawaii State Teachers Association likened the demand for teacher evaluations to the anti-labor policies of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican. Environmentalists felt betrayed by proposals — tacitly supported by the governor — for temporary environmental and regulatory exemptions to speed up state construction projects. Open government advocates complained about a lack of transparency.

Abercrombie, who was known for verbal bomb-throwing during his time as a legislator, said the rhetoric has been harsh. The governor said the exemption proposals that drew the most opposition were misunderstood and, in the end, failed to make it through the legislative process.

Abercrombie does not believe he has betrayed anyone on the left.

"Apparently you don’t know me very well at all," he said of his critics. "I have never been anybody’s rubber stamp. I’ve never been anybody’s reflection pool."

House Speaker Calvin Say (D, St. Louis Heights-Wilhelmina Rise-Palolo Valley) defended proposals to fast-track state construction as tools to stimulate economic recovery and create jobs. With hundreds of millions in state construction spending already authorized — and a massive new infusion approved for next fiscal year — many lawmakers thought temporary environmental and regulatory exemptions might have helped the Abercrombie administration.

"Knowing that I couldn’t do it through general excise tax exemptions or tax credits, the focus was put on the procurement process along with the permitting process," the speaker said.

The Senate also wanted to streamline permitting and procurement for state construction, but not to the degree the House did, so Say and his allies took the brunt of the blowback.

Robert Harris, director of the Sierra Club Hawaii chapter, said that while there may have been extreme statements made on both sides of the debate, the scale of bills placing environmental regulations in a "cross hair attack" was different than anything seen in the past decade.

Abercrombie himself never made a full-throated case for exemptions, but the state Department of Transportation, the state Department of Land and Natural Resources and the state Office of Planning backed many of the House’s efforts. According to several sources, Gary Hooser, director of the state Office of Environmental Quality Control, who publicly fought the exemptions, was asked by the governor’s advisers to tone down his rhetoric.

"I think there is a bit of frustration with the Abercrombie administration because the ‘New Day’ promises were squarely to respect environmental protections," Harris said. "And it seems like the attitude of silence is in disregard of the promises made during the campaign."

Kat Brady, coordinator for the Community Alliance on Prisons, said progressives often felt shut out. Some of the mechanics of the legislative process that could be viewed as routine — time limits on testimony, amendments, re-referring bills between committees, reviving bills that appear dead — take on a shadowy edge when people think they are not being heard.

"I had the impression that it’s ‘Shut up and sit down! We’re driving,’" she said. "And the problem is the drivers don’t really have a map and we’re all in the car."

Brady said she thought it would be different with Abercrombie in charge. "I think under the former administration, the Lingle administration, we were very vigilant. We knew we had to watch everything," she said. "And I think when this administration came in there was a sense of, ‘Whew, good. You know? These are our guys.’ And pretty much immediately the lack of transparency was pretty obvious. And that’s been very frightening."

While many Democrats at the Legislature were unsettled — including several in the House dissident faction at odds with Speaker Say — no Democrat stepped forward to give real public voice to the dissatisfaction from the left or provide political cover for critics like Hooser.

Instead, Rep. Cynthia Thielen (R, Kailua-Kaneohe) and Rep. Gil Riviere (R, Schofield-Kahuku) filled the void.

Thielen, an environmental and land use attorney, believes more environmental and regulatory exemptions would have been approved had they and others remained silent. She said Republicans were following the legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive who prized conservation.

"It really took some pretty heavy floor arguments to say, ‘You guys, what are you doing? You’re destroying what your predecessors worked so hard to put in place,’" Thielen said.

Abercrombie’s openness to temporary environmental and regulatory exemptions, aides who have worked with him say, was based on an eagerness to get things done. "The message that we were sending was: the governor wants jobs. CIP was about jobs," Bruce Coppa, the governor’s chief of staff, said of state construction.

Action-oriented and sometimes impulsive, the governor saw that he had to suspend dozens of environmental and regulatory laws last year when he declared emergencies to help contain decades-old military ordnance or relocate endangered nene from Lihue Airport. In the most sweeping exemption bill now awaiting his signature, lawmakers agreed to temporarily suspend many of those same regulations for 11 rehabilitation projects at deteriorating state bridges.

Taped to his desk in his fifth-floor office at the state Capitol — on a piece of note paper from Kauai Community College — Abercrombie keeps a line from the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson as a reminder of the big picture: "Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience."

The governor realizes he might have to do some fence-mending within his party. "Of course I will," he said. "I may have to do some fence rebuilding or something. But that’s all right, because my view is I’m always closing. I’m always on offense. I don’t intend to mend fences in that sense with anybody. What I intend to do is go and point out to them where I think maybe they were not paying close enough attention. They ought to take a look at themselves."