THE higher you go, the more the rules change. If you run for the school board, expect a few candidate debates and a campaign based on name recognition. Run for governor and be ready to play smash-mouth politics. Democrats try to take Lingle's money
For GOP Maui Mayor Lingle, the lesson to be learned this spring is that Hawaii Democratic politicians play tough, they play to win and on election day they expect to win.
There isn't a lot of sentiment involved. When you lose patronage you lose jobs. Lose enough jobs and you lose your power.
Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa, authors of the 1998 edition of "The Almanac of American Politics," still give the best description of Hawaii's Democratic political machine.
"There are echoes of a Pacific Rim political style - cool, competent, tough, unsentimental; Hawaii is one of the few states to prohibit write-in votes," they wrote.
The state House Democrats, spurred on by Governor Cayetano, last week showed just how tough they could be by trying to take Lingle's campaign money away.
They said they were closing a loophole in campaign spending that allows candidates to get money from political parties.
The proposal's genesis, however, makes you wonder that after 12 years in the Legislature, eight years as lieutenant governor and three as governor, Cayetano suddenly felt it was necessary to rush down to the Legislature to gut an existing bill and amend it to block all but $6,000 in party donations to a candidate.
Cayetano's explanations seem to have taken a detour around the truth, perhaps landing on it briefly.
When Lingle first hollered that the bill came just after the GOP raised $250,000 and was a direct result of Cayetano's re-election efforts, his own staff denied it.
"This is the first we've heard of it," said Lloyd Nekoba, the Cayetano campaign coordinator and one of the closest rings in Caye-tano's inner circle.
Then Cayetano said he wasn't behind the bill. Then he told a television reporter he and the House and Senate Democratic leaders talked it over while on the mainland last month.
Putting aside the bill's strange birth, its rationale is equally curious. What is the mainland dollar amount that signals corruption?
If $6,000 is what Cayetano thinks is the most you can get from a political party, without venturing into the dangerous realm of soft money, what about Cayetano's political buddy, U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, who gets a majority of his campaign money out of state? Should Cayetano even appear on the same stage with people who employ such loose fund-raising tactics?
Even more dangerous, according to Cayetano, who is always quick to economically divide an electorate, are the offshore rich.
"Is Lingle going to use her party to get all this big mainland money to come here and influence our election?" he asked.
BUT in just the last year, Cayetano's kitty grew by about $100,000, thanks to mainland donations. Among others, banks, drug companies and developers dug into their mainland pockets to help the governor.
GOP attorney Richard Clifton summed up the episode as an "an all-out effort to strangle political opposition."
The public is left wondering what is the real story, but as screenwriter Robert Bolt reminded us: "A man who tells lies merely hides the truth, but a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it."