In the movie "Gran Torino," Clint Eastwood plays a tough old coot who faces down a gang of bullies terrorizing a neighborhood.
He asks them, "Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn’t have f—ed with?" Then he spits on the ground and says, "That’s me."
Mayor Peter Carlisle should have listened when Ben Cayetano tried to deliver him that message a year ago.
Instead, Carlisle all but baited the former governor into running against him with pointless personal insults over their disagreement on rail.
And now, instead of cruising to the easy re-election that could have been his, he’s on the sidelines watching Cayetano and Kirk Caldwell battle for his job after finishing third in the primary.
In 2010, when Carlisle won a special election to finish Mufi Hannemann’s term, Cayetano was a key ally in stumping for him and helping him raise funds.
Cayetano, a leading anti-railer, knew Carlisle favored the $2.6 billion project and didn’t expect him to stop it.
He did, however, extract a promise from Carlisle "to consider seriously all sides of the rail issue — and if you decide to go ahead with rail, then to do it right."
Carlisle acknowledged this in an election-night-victory interview when he said Cayetano would be one of his advisers on transportation issues.
But he gave no ear to Cayetano or any other rail critic. He kept Hannemann’s team, hewed to Hannemann’s rail plan and continued Hannemann’s practice of bashing critics.
A frustrated Cayetano joined Walter Heen, Randall Roth and Cliff Slater in a federal lawsuit challenging the rail environmental impact statement.
If Carlisle had simply said, "I respectfully disagree with my friend Ben Cayetano, and we’ll see what the court says," it’s highly unlikely Cayetano would have come out of a comfortable retirement to run against him.
But Carlisle turned it personal by likening the Cayetano group to the traitorous Chinese "Gang of Four," deriding his "mansion on top of a hill" and depicting him as a geezer stuck in "the solutions of 30 or 40 years ago."
It not only got Cayetano’s dander up, but also got him thinking that maybe a tough old geezer was just what was needed to save our grandchildren from ruin — not only on rail costs, but also on Oahu’s crumbling infrastructure and the takeover of public policy by special interests.
After Cayetano rose in the polls and exposed Carlisle’s weakness, it gave Caldwell an opening to persuade union and business interests that he was the best hope for rail.
Carlisle campaigned on a mantra that he’s not a politician. All he proved by picking a fight with a far more experienced scrapper is that he’s not a very smart one.
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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.
