Way back when in 2002, former Gov. Ben Cayetano almost made us all cry as his own eyes welled up during his last State of the State address.

Hawaii, he told us, needed straight talk, but he reminded that it required empathy as well.

“;Let's discuss the issues frankly and truthfully so the people know what's at stake”; Cayetano said.

“;We owe them the truth. We owe them the courage and wisdom to make wise decisions. We owe them hope.”;

Yesterday there were no tears, little emotion, even as Gov. Linda Lingle offered not so much hope as a clear-eyed management style, promising to stay on the job for 315 more days.

Never one for soaring rhetoric, Lingle had to reach for a local athletic icon to get a big applause line as she ended her last State of the State address, praising Dave Shoji, the volleyball coach.

If Cayetano ran a state with a rocky economy and loud controversies, at least he left with some wins.

His radical government worker-civil service program had not yet been gutted by the Legislature, he saw 13 new schools built, presided over the opening of the H-3 freeway and ushered in Kapolei, a new city.

Lingle started with an economy that could only be called challenging, saw it grow so much that in 2006 she told the Legislature,”;You can have it all.”;

Then the state started losing money.

Lingle's political math became an exercise in subtraction. First she lost most of her GOP legislators, then Republicans lost the White House.

State workers were losing their jobs. If Lingle wasn't telling workers to stay home to save state money, she was giving them pink slips. The schoolkids lost school days and Lingle saw her always-buoyant popularity rating sink.

Like governors before her, Lingle had hoped to make education the big shiny victory trophy. While Cayetano had shielded the Department of Education from budget cuts, he still endured a statewide teachers strike.

As Lingle started her term calling for restructuring, not reform, she ends her tenure with a call to put the next governor in charge of education, if you want results.

Lingle's steady concentration blew life into school science and math programs through her missionary-like zeal for robotics education. But she faced an educational bureaucracy that was as unflinching as it was unmovable.

It will be up to the next governor to have the empathy to give the schools the hope to achieve more.