The leading advice for Democrats to regain national political relevance is to focus less on DEI and cultural wokeness and more on the cost of eggs.
More important than messaging is addressing the pervasive public belief that government doesn’t work — key to swing voters who returned Donald Trump to power.
Joe Biden’s passage of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill was a notable legislative achievement but a massive failure of execution. In more than two years that followed, Biden couldn’t get most of the money disbursed for broadband expansion, electric vehicle charging stations, highway repairs and other critical needs, stymied by bureaucracy.
Frustrated voters were left to wonder, “Where’s my broadband?” and Trump is now slashing funds from Biden’s signature achievement that should have been sent out before he left office.
The sledgehammer “reforms” of Trump and his loose cannon Elon Musk are unlikely to turn out well in providing better services, but congressional Democrats can do little more than point fingers and argue for alternatives they have no power to enact.
It falls to blue states, where the party holds actual power, to show the country Democrats can make government work — and Hawaii is being watched as Gov. Josh Green and Attorney General Anne Lopez raise their profiles in the national Trump resistance.
Unfortunately, right now Hawaii is more a model of government futlessness than excellence.
Droves of residents are leaving for other states as state and county plans lag to provide affordable homes and living-wage jobs. Those living on the streets with no homes at all seem to be getting more visible rather than less as officials aren’t bothering to count this year.
Federal attorneys recently concluded a series of prosecutions that revealed shocking corruption at the heart of our local government.
We can’t seem to do any major undertaking right. Honolulu rail started as a $5 billion project that incompetence grew to a $10 billion disaster that won’t even reach its intended destination. Now state lawmakers are considering throwing another $5 billion at it without stepping up accountability.
The state Capitol was closed several years for costly repairs and now might close again for fixes they missed the first time.
A roof leak in the Hawai‘i Convention Center grew into a $64 million crisis as legislators deferred maintenance while conniving to combine the fixes with nearby development opportunities for big campaign donors.
The new $160 million Hawaii State Hospital remained closed for over a year after its completion because of building defects, and four years later the state is looking at almost $40 million to fix roof, plumbing and drainage problems.
The state abruptly closed Aloha Stadium following decades of neglected maintenance, and after years of changing plans is moving to replace it with a facility that’s overpriced and undersized at $400 million for 25,000 seats and features a giveaway to developers of adjoining lands under a convoluted public-private partnership that drew only one bid.
If blue-state leaders are to be the chief political sales reps nationally on the virtues of Democratic rule, they’d best back up the CNN clips by actually delivering excellent government at home.
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
