Capitol View
WHAT we like in Hawaii is a winner. Win the big game and we are your buddy. Try real hard and almost win the big game and we will still love you. Do not expect us to be around when things get bad. We like winners, remember. Isle machine won’t
help Henry Peters
The best winners are people, teams and institutions that win all the time. We love it when there is no competition. Things without competition are called monopolies and Hawaii has had a fairly long-standing love affair with them.
Kamehameha profited from the monopoly on the trade of sandalwood as one of Hawaii's first monopolies more than 200 years ago.
The sugar planters quickly realized that quibbling would not lead to profits and they lined up five groups to handle whatever was needed in the islands.
As the late Mario Puzo noted in "The Godfather": "Like businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly."
After order was brought to business, the same structure was carried over to politics.
The Big Five voted Republican. For someone else to vote Democrat was simply inefficient. Times changed but the deep love we have for winning by monopoly continues. Democrats now run Hawaii and serious politicians argue that changing parties would be inefficient.
The powerful monopolies are run by "machines."
Across most of the United States, a political machine is extinct but in Hawaii we continue to hear gears whirring.
The latest to detect a political machine is Henry Peters, the ousted Bishop Estate trustee, who wants his job back. If not a grease monkey, Peters at least knows his way around the cogs and levers of Hawaii's political machinery. He ran the state House as speaker and regularly benefited from the spoils, first appointments to the boards of banks and country clubs, later to the million-dollar-a-year trusteeship of Bishop Estate.
Now that the state is investigating him and insisting on convening a grand jury to indict him, Peters thinks a political machine is out to get him.
Oddly enough, Peters last week maintained that the Cayetano political machine was determined to do him in.
Gov. Ben Cayetano may be many things. Mr. Big in a political machine is not one of them.
IF you ran a political machine, you would not have to hire and pay extra state money to have your former executive assistant lobby your package at the Legislature. Lobbyists would do this for free. Also if you were a political machine kingpin, you would get that package through the Legislature, unlike Cayetano.
If you ran a political machine, you would have more than one person to appoint as insurance commissioner, but Cayetano has gone to the well with Wayne Metcalf twice. It you had an organized political machine you would have a candidate all ready to replace Margery Bronster as attorney general, instead of having to pull up Earl Anzai, who had already put in the reject pile by the state Senate.
And if you ran a machine you would have the clout to keep the public employee unions in place instead of having to fend off another demand for budget-busting raises.
After years of weakening, Hawaii's powerful political machine may be finished, but that will not help Henry Peters. His problems didn't come from the inner workings of the governor's office, but from his own past performance.
Bishop Estate Archive
Richard Borreca reports on Hawaii's politics every Wednesday.
He can be reached by e-mail at rborreca@pixi.com