Talk Story
In Case Hawaii
gets a candidate
for governor ...THE CANDIDATE was relaxed and confident. "I don't think the question is whether we have to change," Ed Case says. It's "how we can best change and who can best deliver the kind of change that the voters are looking for."
Attorney Case, a fourth-generation, Hilo-born kamaaina and cousin of AOL's Steve Case, is running for governor.
"Major aspects of Hawaii have to change," he says. "We spent most of the 1990s dealing with whether we have to change or not and we had a lot of denial and anger ... I think the voters this year are going to stand up and say, 'Hey, get on with it already.'
"The next governor is going to have face these three or four areas right away." He ticks them off: the economy, the growth in the cost of government and public education.
The problem isn't necessarily the size of government, Case says, but how much it costs. Dodging the issue, the Legislature this year drained special funds to balance the budget. That option won't be there next time. It'll be raising taxes to increase revenues, which Case rejects, or cutting costs.
THE NEXT governor will have to act "pretty fast to bring the cost of government under control and, frankly, any candidate that says otherwise is just posturing," says Case.
How would he do it? Case has a habit of ticking off multi-part answers. He enumerates:
>> First, agree that cuts are needed.The problem with Hawaii schools isn't money but governance, Case says. He'd decentralize the system, creating smaller, more responsive districts.>> Second, cut jobs through attrition and eliminating vacancies where possible.
>> Third, privatize government services -- the authorization to do so only recently became effective.
>> Fourth, reform civil service and collective bargaining to better manage resources.
>> Fifth and most difficult, cut non-core programs and personnel. "The question is, which ones and how?" Case says. He recommends the process the federal government used to close military bases.
"We missed a golden opportunity this year," he said. "I thought we owed it to the voters to let them decide whether to decentralize or not. The defeat of the constitutional amendment proposal was, I thought, too bad."
As for the University of Hawaii, he'd insulate it from the capital. "There's been a little too much political meddling," Case says.
Then there's devising a permanent resolution of Hawaiian issues -- "I think the next governor can do that," he says.
But the big issue, Case says, "is that most of us simply feel left out of our government. We feel that it is operating at a distance from us, that it's removed from us and not doing what we want."
WE NEED to feel we're all in this together, he says, "not that government is down there representing 5 percent of the people.
"The governor's going to have to lead that one," Case says. If the people he appoints "come out of the same political culture that got us where we are today, (we can't) expect to have the kind of change we need."
After four terms as state representative for Manoa, with two years as majority leader, Case knows the culture intimately, but denies he's part of it.
"I don't come out of that political culture and I think that's what distinguishes me from the other candidates," he said.
I left our interview with the same question I went into it with: Smarts and skills aside, does Ed Case have the charisma he'll need to capture the imagination of voters? I asked a colleague what she thought.
"All he has to do is smile," she said opening the press packet and pointing at the candidate's photograph.
"I mean, look at that," she said.
John Flanagan is the Star-Bulletin's contributing editor.
He can be reached at: jflanagan@starbulletin.com.