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Hawaii’s World
HAWAII needs a better balance in Congress -- at least one Republican in our four-member delegation. Phil Meyers is
attractive challenger
to AbercrombieDr. Phil Meyers, the Republican Party's nominee to unseat Neil Abercrombie, says that Hawaii will suffer no loss if Abercrombie is not re-elected.
Meyers, I'm sad to say, probably has no chance against the five-term congressman, but only because he doesn't have the budget to get himself better known. Of all the GOP candidates I have cheered for over recent years -- just to bring a better political balance to the state -- he is among the most appealing.
If the Republicans had a full slate of candidates like him this year, the Democratic sweep and upset of 1954 might finally be reversed.
Meyers has lived in Hawaii only eight years. That's long enough to develop the same sense I share that a more even political balance would be healthy for Hawaii.
His mother served six terms in Congress from Kansas, so he is no political innocent.
As a pediatrician, he sees a lot of human problems first hand. Almost by definition, he has to be a man of compassion, and clearly is.
No one can classify him as a flinty, steel-hearted rich person when he says the Republican idea of as little federal meddling as possible with local and state governments is the best way to national good health. In other words, grass-roots government is to be preferred when it can do the job.
Meyers has nice turns of phrases, as when he says Abercrombie is an undertaker to small business. Abercrombie earned a zero rating from the National Federation of Independent Business for votes helping small businesses stay alive, Meyers says, but would give their owners a good send-off when they die by eliminating the inheritance tax.
Meyers is for Hawaiian sovereignty so long as it comes with a ban against gambling. He sees how destructive the drug "ice" is to the Hawaiian families he deals with in his practice. He doesn't want legal gambling as another destructive force.
His medical view of abortion is that it will become more and more a true matter of personal choice because of legalization of the abortion pill and via "how to" instructions on the Net for achieving it with the aid of a friend. He is against doctor-assisted death.
The nominee wants a "sustainable" plan for prescription drug coverage under Medicare, wants more local and parental control over education, favors a global missile defense system, and wants individual control over health care "with doctors making medical decisions, not bureaucrats or corporate accountants." He wants a review process to protect patients against insurers,
A registry to track child-abuse victims moving interstate would be his top legislative priority.
Meyers is taking vacation from Kaiser Permanente to campaign. The American Medical Association has contributed to his campaign but his employer is hands-off.
He is a young, healthy specimen, aged 45 come Thursday, with a wife and 7-year-old daughter. He thinks -- as do I -- that Hawaii needs a more balanced political ecology to better test economic ideas with two-party competition. He sees bureaucrats, who are often insensitive to the human consequences of their actions, as too dominant today.
The First Congressional District had a Republican representative in Patricia Saiki, who left to try for the U.S. Senate. In 1994 and 1996, Orson Swindle ran well for the GOP but not well enough. Meyers, unhappily, is a newcomer simply not well enough known to win.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.