Before we leave behind the 2012 election, let’s shine a light on a questionable gambit that played out in the final days of the mayor’s race, in hope the glare will discourage similar tactics in the future.
In the last week before the election, Mayor-elect Kirk Caldwell’s campaign mailed out a flier that said, "Please join Senator Daniel K. Inouye and us in supporting Kirk Caldwell."
It was signed by more than 50 prominent members of the local Japanese-American community such as Breene Harimoto, Bert Kobayashi Jr., Fujio Matsuda, Barbara Tanabe and Arthur and Ruth Ushijima.
On the reverse side was a picture of Caldwell with his Japanese-American wife, banker Donna Tanoue.
In one household with four registered voters, this flier was sent only to the one voter who had a Japanese surname by marriage.
Ethnicity has always played an underlying role in Hawaii politics; certainly former Gov. Ben Cayetano’s campaign was working hard in the Filipino-American community that is his base.
And Caucasian candidates from Frank Fasi and Jeremy Harris to Ed Case and Brian Schatz have featured their local wives prominently to establish their Hawaii bona fides.
But the Caldwell flier was one of the most blatantly direct racial appeals we’ve seen from a candidate for major office — up there in subtlety with former Mayor Mufi Hannemann’s infamous "I look like you, you look like me" speech in his 2010 race for governor.
As our community becomes more diverse and our public culture more mature, this is the kind of cheap politics we should be outgrowing, not institutionalizing.
Japanese-Americans have always been among Hawaii’s most diligent and discerning voters, and it’s disrespectful to appeal to them in this way.
It’s especially surprising that Inouye lent his name to the effort.
In 2010 he supported Hannemann but publicly scolded him for his controversial "Compare and Decide" brochure, which among other things invited voters to compare Hannemann’s Japanese-American wife with Neil Abercrombie’s Caucasian wife.
"To say that my wife is Japanese and yours is something else, that’s not nice," Inouye admonished. "You have to keep in mind that some people might resent that."
The message that Inouye condemned in 2010 is exactly the message the Caldwell flier he was part of tried to impart in 2012.
It raises an interesting question that Barbara Tanabe was a signatory to the Caldwell mailer; she’s a public relations executive who represented Pacific Resource Partnership in its $3 millioncampaignto support Caldwell by attacking Cayetano.
Her foot in both the PRP effort and Caldwell campaign would seem to bend — if not break — campaign spending rules that disallow collaboration between independent expenditure groups such as PRP and candidates.
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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.
