Before the superb alliteration, she was Linda Sue Cutter, born into a family of car dealers.

After a brief marriage, she kept the name, Linda Lingle.

She also kept the DNA and became a superb saleswoman.

It is a low-key approach that works best with local audiences. There are no histrionics or rants, nor does she have to resort to legal mumbo jumbo. At the end of her presentation, Lingle makes the sale.

If her dad and uncle could put you in a new Dodge, Gov. Lingle can get you to see the wisdom in her budget, tax plan or new land program.

So it is all the more mystifying why she has made such a hash of the school furlough issue.

The gentle folks now residing in her lobby are only a symbolic protest. Turning high-pressure water hoses on them would be the only way Lingle could have handled this any worse than the passive aggression she has shown with her nasty letters and threats of arrest.

If Lingle is blessed with the ability to sell, why didn't she devote five hours to selling those kids and parents the first night they were camping in her office?

If she waited until the television crews were gone and then came out to talk, how could it not have gone better?

Sit down on the carpet with them, give the kids milk and Oreos and quietly explain her side of the furlough issue.

If she wheeled out a white board listing meetings with the unions, teachers, Board of Education and Department of Education, why would she not be believed?

I recall that former state Sen. Richard Wong was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee when he chopped the University of Hawaii budget. A group of particularly impolite university students and professors rallied at the Capitol demanding changes.

After the UH crowd was finished howling, Wong invited them into a conference room, went to the white board to dispassionately explain the state budget to them. After two hours, the UH crowd left, maybe not agreeing with Wong, but understanding this grown-up world is made of grays, not blacks and whites.

What would the protesting parents have done if Lingle had just tried to bridge the gap, instead of having sheriffs threaten to arrest them? The parents said they resented “;being treated like an inconsequential, wacky fringe group.”;

“;We are just parents who are fed up,”; one woman said. In these times when Lingle needs to define her legacy, it is just seems smarter to look like Mother Teresa, rather than Bull Connor.