IT is a scary time, before both Halloween and the Nov. 3 election, so consider some comforting words. First, this election year could have been a lot worse. The scourge of modern elections is negative campaigning. Not much negative
campaigning this year
Going negative is a conscious act. Politicians and their strategists do it to win. Full-scale attacks on your opponent cause the other side to bring up the heavy artillery and soon both sides are saying perfectly ridiculous things about each other.
One side says the other side hates education, the other side hates the environment. Most of it is twaddle and nonsense, but it serves a calculated purpose: Negative campaigning drives the marginal voter away.
It strips the election to just the core supporters, those who will vote for you even if a federal strike force just indicted you and your entire family.
But for the most part Hawaii has been spared the Halloween trick-or-treat of negative campaigning. U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie and state Rep. Gene Ward, his Republican opponent, have come close in their television commercials, but they are both using mainland political consultants who may just not know how to act in Hawaii.
And then Gov. Ben Cayetano tramped through the sometimes productive fields of local boyism, hoping to define himself and the Democrats as the party of Hawaii.
The ploy has proven successful for decades in the South, as practitioners such as Sen. Jesse Helms would call on voters to elect someone "who represents North Carolina values" rather than "Washington values." But the message in Hawaii never really vibrated enough for Cayetano to keep it around.
His opponent, Maui Mayor Linda Lingle, gave Cayetano her own trick during the election by first pledging to limit her campaign spending and then ignoring the promise by spending over the limit.
"Whoops" was about all that she had as an explanation, but Cayetano and the Democrats came after Lingle -- demanding that she be indicted and possibly barred from holding office. So instead of painting her as a fibber or financial fumbler, the Democrats managed to turn her into Joan of Arc.
The reason that this is an election year to bring smiles and encouragement comes from the thousands of yard signs sprouting around the state -- the earnest intensity of the campaign and how it has engaged Hawaii's citizens.
There is a real excitement this year. The campaign issues may hover around "values" or the economy or "change" but the call to get out and vote and to pay attention to politics has never been stronger. And not just the adults are engaged.
The national Kids Voting project is a well-organized stroke of genius that should pay off double -- first, in more voters being marched to the polls by their children, excited by their chance to vote; second, Kids Voting should translate into a generation of citizens who take seriously their responsibility to vote.
IF we could get back this campaign to do over, I wish we had had more debates, live or edited, on television, radio and even over the Internet.
Cayetano and Lingle both ran too much to their own game, without having to stretch and show voters what they are. In a perfect campaign the candidates would have explored taxes and finance, health care, prisons and crime, transportation and education, all in separate debates.
The next issue will be translating this year of campaign promises into a new year of both change and accomplishment.
Richard Borreca reports on Hawaii's politics every Wednesday.
He can be reached by e-mail at rborreca@pixi.com