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On Politics Richard Borreca |
His boundless optimism
just wasn't enoughEvan Dobelle is striding through the downtown Pacific Club dining room. At tables dotted with business and political luminaries, the 58-year old University of Hawaii president stops momentarily.
By the time Dobelle has wended his way to the less formal downstairs cafe, he has ticked off the names of a half-dozen of Hawaii's top leaders, giving little insights or points of gossip about each one.
You feel like he is answering an essay question: "Show that you know Hawaii's establishment and how you relate to it."
Dobelle then plunges into some serious name-dropping. He ruminates about David Murdock, the self-made billionaire owner of Castle & Cooke, most of Lanai and Dole Foods, explaining how he was able to get a meeting with the California tycoon to pitch the university.
"Why should I give you any money?" Dobelle says Murdock asked.
The story serves to segue into essay question No. 2: "What have you done to improve UH?"
With hardly a pause, Dobelle is hitting all the bullet points. He supports and feels a great kinship with the community colleges, he reorganized the university system, faculty morale was bad before he came, athletic director Herman Frazier and football coach June Jones were not here before he came, the university needed change and he was fighting for change.
The next question is open-ended: "Discuss your involvement in politics."
Ah, politics. Dobelle is fluent. He's a former mayor of Pittsfield, Mass., Jimmy Carter's chief of protocol, assistant secretary of state and officer of the national Democratic Party. He cut his teeth on Massachusetts politics along with presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. In fact, Kerry and Dobelle were good friends when the lanky U.S. senator was lieutenant governor of Massachusetts.
"John would sit in the living room and talk all night," Dobelle says.
Then he poses a telling question for himself: "Why is it that Gov. Lingle promised change, ran on a 'change the state' platform, and here I am proposing change after change and I'm getting hammered and she is growing more popular?"
Dobelle insists he was hired to break the old molds, but is unable to fathom the difference between change and promise of change. He equates the nods and positive replies as approval, not factoring in the polite local style "yes" meaning "yes, I understand you" rather than "yes, I agree with you."
Dobelle tosses out the last question in the form of a statement: "I have an iron-clad contract, there is no way the board can fire me, so the regents have to realize they can't get rid of me. They will realize that and come around."
Last week Evan Dobelle got his test scores back.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
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.