IF you want to play in the big leagues, you'd better know what you are doing. In local politics, if the next card in your hand is the so-called race card, you'd better know what to do with it. Playing the race card
in Hawaii politicsHawaii may bill itself as a racial melting pot where no one ethnic group is a majority, but we have as finely tuned ethnic antennas as any place in the nation.
We know the code words. We don't use them, but we will watch and wait for someone else to explain themselves along racial lines.
Ethnic humor can be funny. Ethnic politics can be powerful, but dangerous.
We are not a color-blind society, but we are understanding enough to realize that there is not much use in polarizing our schools, communities and churches.
In this race for governor, however, the issue, if not the attempt at polarization, is just below the surface. You could detect it when former state judge and now Democratic Party Chairman Walter Heen remarked on Maui that the GOP candidate for governor, Linda Lingle, was a "wonder woman."
"It's a wonder she came here (to Hawaii). It's a wonder she's staying," Heen told a group of Democrats.
For anyone who has left their home elsewhere and chosen to live in Hawaii, Heen's words are cautionary, if not exclusionary.
This week, Heen was holding a news conference to decry what he thought was a racist campaign by the Republicans. He had a GOP fund-raising letter that warned Republicans the Democrats were out to get them.
"They will spend millions more in an ugly attempt to turn good people against each other by trying to convince us that we should vote based on the color of our skin rather than what is in our hearts," Heen said, quoting the GOP letter.
True, the GOP is nervous about the Democrats' campaign tactics. Many still remember the union ads against D.G. "Andy" Anderson, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate, who was pictured on a threatening white horse, with remarks about how the GOP of old worked over Hawaii's plantation society.
Cayetano himself has addressed the campaign in terms of "us versus them," saying voters shouldn't let "them take this away from us."
Public opinion polls show that Cayetano has lost nearly all of the white vote. His strategists say Cayetano's re-election campaign is focused on winning votes from other groups.
In his now-famous remark about losing the university faculty union endorsement, while gaining the fire fighters' union support, Cayetano appeared to be taking a divisive tact.
"If I had to choose between the fire fighters and the university faculty, I'd take the fire fighters any day, because the fire fighters are my kind of people," Cayetano said.
RACIAL lines in Hawaii don't mean as much as they did a decade ago. Mixed marriages have created a new ethnic group that identifies not along ethnic lines, but place of birth.
The pre-World War II Republican oligarchy means nothing to them. The politics of John Burns and ethnic pride symbolized in George Ariyoshi count for very little compared to the pride of being born in Hawaii.
As Mario Cuomo, one of the nation's best Democratic politicians, explained: "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose."
Today neither Democrats nor Republicans have done much to lift this campaign, to give us hope or unity.
Richard Borreca reports on Hawaii's politics every Wednesday.
He can be reached by e-mail at rborreca@pixi.com