The legacy idea as it relates to Neil Abercrombie assumes there really was a legacy but it got lost in the shuffle of political defeat.

In this tradition, I would have to credit the departing governor with appointing good Supreme Court justices.

He also helped us collectively through the marriage-equality issue, which wasn’t that easy for a lot of people.

The third thing, I can’t remember.

As he talks his way down the corridor, he is promoting the idea that his inherited budget deficit caused him to make those hard choices that got him into so much trouble.

He once likened his discovery of the deficit to walking off a cliff. He entered office wanting to do so many good things, and he was forced into desperate measures to save the state of Hawaii from bankruptcy.

The reality was that the scale of his panic considerably exceeded the scale of his problem.

Former Govs. George Ariyoshi and Ben Cayetano were qualified, as no other individuals, to assess Abercrombie’s governance. Among our seven elected governors, these two inherited budget deficits that, like Abercrombie’s, resulted from economic recessions.

Against a billion-dollar budget, Ariyoshi made up a $340 million deficit over three years.

Against a $3 billion budget, Cayetano made up a $250 million deficit.

Abercrombie’s situation was no comparison. He made up a $220 million deficit against an $11 billion budget — all of this in continuously inflated dollars.

In his first legislative session as governor, he essentially proposed to finance the deficit on the backs of seniors and state workers. When this blew up in face, he turned to rapid development as a means of expanding state revenues.

As a Ph.D. student at Manoa in the ’60s, he had written his dissertation about the urban planner Lewis Mumford, who famously prescribed an urban vision for Honolulu in the 1930s. In conversation, Abercrombie summoned the Mumford tradition of big ideas. He seemingly convinced himself that his "Third City" of Kakaako towers, the Honolulu rail (to which he gave the environmental-impact-statement green light), and the suburbanization of the rest of southern Oahu, was similarly visionary.

What he thought of as bold, most people thought of as ransacking the environment. Both former governors were appalled. Despite deficits, each had established good environmental records. Each had reconciled the deep tensions between development and government finance. In this context, each turned to David Ige as an improbable means of stopping Neil Abercrombie from continuing to do what he was doing.

In their coffee hour talks for Ige, the environmental theme progressed to the codeword "Kakaako." The state budget theme revolved around the fact that Ige had learned about the state budget by serving — as they had — as Ways and Means chairman, an educational experience that Abercrombie as legislator had bypassed.

When we needed calm, Abercrombie gave us imbalance. Where our constitutionally powerful governors have served as a force of equilibrium, Abercrombie created an ongoing disequilibrium.

From the national analysis of Abercrombie’s resulting 36-point record loss, we learn that next down the list was Gov. Price Daniels of Texas. In l972, Daniels was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Sharpstown bank and security scandal, which also took down his lieutenant governor, the speaker of the House, and half of the Texas legislature.

The reasons for Abercrombie’s loss are less readily held in mind, so perhaps the tradition of resurrecting a legacy from the ashes will work in his favor. Good judges and marriage equality provide a progressive cover, but the underlying story is about abandoning the liberal value placed on environmental management and a robust government. It was about broken promises and broken relationships.