Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Honolulu Lite
LIFE is so unfair. Steve Forbes wastes $66 million running for president and I can't afford a new truck muffler. Primarily, Hawaii
lost the big bucksAnd the thing is, he knew he didn't have a chance to win. He may be a nice guy, but America just isn't ready to elect someone so goofy looking. I pointed that out during the last election, during which Forbes blew another several million dollars.
For all the money Forbes threw away, he could have paid down a large chunk of the national debt. Or he could have taken several thousand people off welfare. Or he could have bought 250,000 truck mufflers and handed them out to deserving Ford F-150 owners.
Or he could have adopted the State of Hawaii. We like goofy-looking people here. Especially if they spend a lot of money on us.
Think of all the things Forbes could have done for Hawaii if he had not so selfishly pursued the presidential nomination twice.
The Natatorium War Memorial could have been restored overnight and filled with champagne instead of salt water. Instead, Forbes spent the equivalent of $533 per cow in Iowa and still lost those caucuses.
Forbes could have paved all the roads on Oahu and built a bypass highway in Waianae so that area residents would have an alternate route of escape the next time some guy decides to hold the west shore hostage. Instead, some television station in New Hampshire was able to buy some new carpeting and a couple of digital cameras with Forbe's dough.
FORBES could have launched his own Hawaii-based TV show. Call it "Stevie, P.I." or "Hawaii Five-000,000,000,000." It doesn't matter what he tried, as long as it helped the state economy.
Instead, he bought the entire state of Delaware and hung it on a key chain in his Land Rover. The "Fantasy Island" episodes filmed here were more real than Forbes' presidential bid.
Fat lot of good spending all those millions of dollars did for Forbes on the mainland.
Hawaii doesn't have primaries, like many Mainland states do. We have caucuses. The Repulican caucus just picks delegates for the state convention and doesn't conduct a presidential preference poll. The Democratic Party does conduct a presidential poll but its caucus isn't held until March.
Hawaii should should have a primary election to be held before the earliest mainland primaries in order to reel in some of those big bucks. Winning a Hawaii primary would be just as valid as winning Delaware, a state about the size of Aina Haina but with fewer residents.
Sure, some candidates would forego campaigning in Hawaii because it's so far away. But we might squeeze a few million bucks out of candidates. Even if Forbes just visited the islands once during the primaries, he'd drop enough money in tips to re-sand Waikiki Beach.
Even with Forbes out of the race, it may not be too late to get our share of the campaign dough. We could stage a late season Hawaii primary and try to get George "Money Bucket" Bush and Al "Cash-Gorged" Gore to stop by.
Obviously, they wouldn't come just for the few lousy delegates Hawaii sends to the national Democratic and Republican party conventions. We could entice them with something better than all the Iowa cows and New Hampshire cod fish they've been seeing: walk-on parts on "Baywatch Hawaii."
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
The Honolulu Lite online archive is at:
https://archives.starbulletin.com/lite