Talk Story
Why Hawaii congressional
campaigns get no respectEVER wonder why Hawaii Republicans ended up with Mark Terry, a professional auto detailer, as their candidate for the first U.S. Congress seat held by Neil Abercrombie?
If you drive to work on Kalanianaole Highway, you've seen Terry standing alone on the sidewalk with his sign for months. His victory in the primary was a tribute to the power of low-budget sign waving as well as its limitations.
Terry won the GOP primary election with 8,826 votes to Stephen Bishoff's 8,065. Also hoping to represent District 1 in Washington were fellow Republican candidates Harry Friel (3,957 votes) and Opassi White (2,266). These are not your household names.
Between them, the four GOP candidates got a combined 23,114 votes, 3,760 fewer than the 26,874 blank ballots cast in the Democratic primary which Abercrombie won unopposed with 69,222 votes.
By comparison, Patsy Mink was opposed in the District 2 primary, but she still won 72.6 percent of the vote. Today, she faces a stronger challenge from Republican Bob McDermott, a three-term member of the State House of Representatives, ex-Marine and Hawaii Pacific University instructor.
Despite being asked not to run by GOP House leaders, McDermott launched a dark-horse campaign against Mink, but found himself battling a ghost after she died of viral pneumonia in September. The deceased Mink, who served in Congress for 24 years, is a more difficult opponent than McDermott bargained for. Who dares speak ill of the dead?
WHY this lack of local competition in a mid-term Congressional election that is arguably more hotly contested nationally than any in memory?
After all, Republicans hold 223 seats, the Democrats 208. After five deaths, five resignations and an expulsion (James Traficant, D-Ohio, convicted of bribery, tax evasion and fraud), the Democrats need to pick up just six seats more than they lose to regain control of the House -- it's that close.
Blame the competition -- or lack of it -- on local state legislatures, says John Harwood, writing last Friday in the Wall Street Journal.
Harwood argues that the nation is now split almost 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats. Accordingly, after the last census these legislatures redrew district boundaries "ostensibly to reflect demographic changes but often to push political agendas." They "stacked the vast majority of them to favor one side or the other."
The resulting "gerrymandering and stalemate" has left only about 40 races to be seriously contested out of 435. Compared to 10 years ago, this is less than a third the number of competitive seats there used to be, experts say.
Clearly, neither Hawaii race is on the "seriously contested" list.
So, while neither national party can spare a dollar to challenge safe seats like Hawaii's, they are shoveling the bucks into those 40 hot races. The real struggles are being fought on unlikely battlefields such as South Bend, Ind., Aberdeen, S.D., and Charleston, W. Va., three cities where President Bush spent a day stumping for Republicans last week.
If 1.2 million Hawaii residents feel "Linda & Duke" and "Mazie & Matt" have become almost members of their families after they spent a combined $6 million or so getting their names and faces into our mailboxes, on our TV screens, into our newspapers and on the radio, imagine how only 635,000 residents of West Virginia's Second Congressional District feel after $8.8 million has been plowed into the contest between incumbent Republican Shelley Moore and Democratic challenger Jim Humphreys.
In Pennsylvania's 17th district, the race between Democrat Tim Holden and Republican George Gekas has generated so much television advertising that the average viewer is seeing Holden's campaign pitches at least 14 times a week and Gekas' close to 30.
Eat your heart out, Mark Terry.
John Flanagan is the Star-Bulletin's contributing editor.
He can be reached at: jflanagan@starbulletin.com.