On Politics
By Richard Borreca
Sunday, February 10, 2002
Isle GOP suffering
from growing painsHawaii's Republicans are easily the quickest growing new political idea in town. The once moribund local GOP now boasts 30,000 members and is planning a state convention with 1,000 delegates.
The GOP is raising money, recruiting new members and finding new candidates. But all is not going smoothly inside the rapidly bulging GOP tent.
For instance, with all that political excitement ready to be tapped, there was a oddly subdued mood to last week's Lincoln Day dinner, the big annual GOP fund-raising event of the year.
Last year, in comparison, the crowd had just realized how potent the GOP could be. The 2000 elections provided the state House with 19 GOP members, the most since statehood, and enough votes to be a strong force in the House work product.
Last year's ebullience was replaced this year with a quiet and muted tone. And that was emphasized with a lackluster speech by Linda Lingle, the outgoing party chairwoman, who triggered the party's revitalization.
She spoke for less than 10 minutes, mostly naming people she wanted to thank. By missing some groups and individuals like the Log Cabin Republicans and Honolulu Councilman John Henry Felix, she startled some people who wondered if some groups were more favored than others.
Lingle is capable of delivering an extemporaneous, flat-out great speech, but last week she was just flat. She mentioned only that education and the economy would be the big issues in the upcoming campaign for governor -- no big revelation there -- and then seized on the old line from Gov. John Waihee's first campaign, "a new beginning," to describe her race.
Afterwards, several Republicans said they thought Lingle had lost a perfect chance to define her message for her best supporters. She responded later that she would save the political rhetoric for the GOP convention and was worried that the program was running late.
The evening also had an ominous note with the inclusion of Jim Gilmore, the former Virginia governor, as the guest speaker. Gilmore made political history last year by being the shortest-serving GOP national committeeman in the party's history and was named one of Newsweek's "losers of 2001" because he failed to keep a Republican hold of the governorship in his heavily Republican state of Virginia.
If Lingle's Lincoln Day dinner was a bit off-putting, there is also concern that the party itself has grown so big that it has forgotten about some of the old-timers.
The other side of that coin, as Lingle points out, is that in the old days, the Lincoln Day dinner was an intimate affair for 300 or so. Now there are 1,700 putting down their money for a seat at the table.
Included in the group last week were most of the GOP House members, who, while being a potent force when they band together on an issue in the House, are coming up with some weird public positions.
First off, they all showed up at the dinner while the Legislature was still in session. The GOP claimed the Democrats held a late-night legislative session just to thwart GOP plans for the dinner. If the Democrats come out with a last-minute attack ad in October showing 18 vacant GOP chairs while the Democrats are all hard at work and the Republicans were at a political banquet, it will only be the GOP's fault.
Not attending the dinner was Rep. Bob McDermott, the Aiea-Foster Village Republican and former Marine, who is carrying on a one-man fragging operation against the GOP. He escalated the war last week by announcing to his fellow Republicans that he would no longer attend their caucus.
"This is the second year in a row that the party, under Chair Lingle's direction, has tried to squeeze each of us for a $1,000 contribution," he said in a letter telling the GOP caucus that he wouldn't attend their meeting because they feel he violated "the trust of the caucus" after he held a news conference to complain that GOP officials asked for donations during a caucus meeting.
Finally, while McDermott is tossing the grenades inside the tent, Big Island Republican Rep. Jim Rath is at least throwing them out for general consumption.
Although former state House members, such as Neil Abercrombie, now a U.S. congressman regularly wore jeans, Rath was urged recently by House Speaker Calvin Say to stick to business attire. Those orders triggered a Rath political diatribe to the entire house:
"To think that my dress should be judged by some which have done nothing more than feed at the government trough, been the parasite that feeds off the creativity of business, is incredulous. If I don't mind my non-business colleagues playing businessman 'dress up,' they most certainly shouldn't mind my jeans," Rath said.
So far, so good. Now this fall, Hawaii's newest emerging political party will find out from the voters what sells.
Richard Borreca writes on politics every Sunday in the Star-Bulletin.
He can be reached at 525-8630 or by e-mail at rborreca@starbulletin.com.
