It was interesting to see the ruckus involving Senator Inouye, former Gov. Ben Cayetano, and the pro-rail labor-industry group, Pacific Resource Partnership, all boiling over at about the same time that a lawsuit over access to University of Hawaii records offered a reminder of the senator’s behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing.
The lawsuit was filed two weeks ago by the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation seeking access to “all emails and correspondence” between UH officials and the offices of Gov. Abercrombie and Sen. Inouye concerning the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope proposed for the summit of Haleakala.
It was reported earlier that Inouye’s staff, communicating directly or through the governor’s office, put inappropriate pressure on the hearing officer appointed by the Board of Land and Natural Resources to handle a contested case hearing on the university’s application application for a permit to build in a conservation district. The hearing officer later complained publicly about the external pressure. Two weeks later, he was fired.
The former superintendent of Haleakala National Park has also alleged she was pressured by Inouye’s office to drop opposition to the telescope. Her prior statement was referenced in the current lawsuit. As Civil Beat reported:
“While serving as superintendent, I was well aware of Senator Inouye’s displeasure with my statements/comments against the construction of the ATST,” she wrote. “His staff assistant, James Chang, office placed heavy pressure on me to mute objections that the National Park Service had regarding the impacts of the ATSST. For example, in a meeting with Mr. Chang he strongly encouraged me to go along with the construction of the ATST project. When I stated it was my job to guard against such extreme impacts to this majestic national park, he indicated they would go to the Secretary of the Interior to override my objections.”
The lawsuit is seeking documents to determine whether the university was cooperating with Inouye’s office, which may have been improper for a party involved in the case, depending on the specific nature of the communications. The university has so far resisted all requests for the email and correspondence.
In all this behind the scenes stuff, isn’t it perfectly reasonable to believe that Senator Inouye and his staff weren’t informed by the views of regular folks? I believe that’s what Ben Cayetano said about the senator. To me, that isn’t anything that deserves an apology. It sounds much more like the truth, or a very reasonable approximation of it.
Catetano’s statement in its entirety was not disrespectful of the senator in any way. I think this whole campaign (be nice Ben) is a huge tactical mistake on the part of the pro rail forces.
With the rail stances of the candidates so clearly laid out, we can test empirically whether or not the Senator is out of touch on the rail issue. We can conduct a poll and see whether Ben is getting any support. Oh wait, didn’t we do that already?
I have not seen the debate yet, but Borrecca’s recap of it was brutal. “No mas?”.
Oh Oh. Did you hear? John White is going to be pretty busy protecting his idols!
BeNiceWooWoo.com
BeNiceIan.com
Be NiceRagnar.com
BeNiceWailau.com
Maybe to make it easy. Johnny boy can use
BeNiceEverybody.com
Probably the best interview I’ve read yet on Cayetano’s outlook and aspirations as mayor:
http://www.thefilipinochronicle.com/hfchronicle%20Coverstory-1_05052012.html
The whole thing is embarrassing. Be nice? Is that what Hawai‘i needs? More nice? Inouye’s response to Cayetano is QED on the original point.
And while we’re on the subject, how is Dan Inouye doing in Washington, anyway? When was the last time any local media outlet explored this question? What has he accomplished in his 50 years of service, other than the years themselves? Inouye botched the Iran-Contra hearings, by all accounts, letting himself and the Congress be bullied by no less a clown than Oliver North. That was what, 25 years ago? What has he done since?
World War II had many heroes, and was completed 57 years ago. Inouye has been duly honored and has been in Congress for 50 years. Time to move on.
Senator Inouye expects deference and respect and becomes petulant if he doesn’t get it. He has been a senator for nearly 50 years and knows how to bulldoze his way through opposition. For example, H-3 should be named the Inouye Freeway. At his age, 87, it is natural that he has no patience for delay and the genuine concerns of those in opposition. Ben Cayetano deserves much credit for standing up to him.
The Dan v Ben exchange aside, I was stunned by the strange page one photo in the hybrid following the mayoral debate. Cayetano was in focus, Mayor Carlisle was barely recognizable and the third guy was a mere ghost.
In all this behind the scenes stuff, isn’t it perfectly reasonable to believe that Senator Inouye and his staff weren’t informed by the views of regular folks?
If Inouye disregards the consensus of strong objections by experts within a federal bureaucracy like the Nation Park Service to the telescope, it is not unreasonable to conceive that he might not listen to the views of “regular folks” either.
But that depends on what one means by “regular folks”. Inouye seems to be highly attuned to the concerns of the regular folks who comprise his political alliance, especially developers and tradesmen. In fact, this may be the main constituency that he is trying to please by pushing for construction at the summit of Haleakala.
However, even if Inouye is not listening to any kind of input, popular or expert, he nevertheless has good intentions. This is akin to the paternalistic character of Asian politics, the sense that “father knows best”. And in traditional societies, father generally does know best, since he’s been there, done that. That does not work so well in the modern world, where everything is new and unknown and technologies have a lifespan not of decades but of months.
This is exactly the problem that Japan has with nuclear power. Based merely on the vaguest notion of “progress” and the desire to up-to-date, and with no real understanding of nuclear energy, the Japanese political elite forced the industry on the population and then hyped it to the point of gross distortion.
Similarly, Inouye recently proclaimed the need for an inter-island ferry system so that people on Molokai could work in Waikiki. This displays that he is out of touch with the way of life on Molokai and the desires of the people there, and does not understand the nature of ferry systems and the ocean.
What does it say when a lowly anonymous blog commenter such as myself is somewhat afraid to post any criticism of Dan Inouye whatsoever? Why does fear of discovery lurk in the back of my mind? Maybe it is because the Senator has a history of squashing less than favorable commenter’s immediately upon the discharge of their comment (see Mayors race), and the Senator’s legions who stand at his side have the resources to track me and anyone else down should they desire to do so. The money that flows through the Senator to the multitude of loyal servants sucking at the federal governments teat is enough to feed the population of any number of third world countries, of this there is no doubt. Any threat to the flow will always be dealt with swiftly and harshly.
All agreed; total rhetoric.
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but I believe Ben has been saying some–albeit, more subtle–version of “Inouye is out of touch” since he threw down the mayoral gauntlet.
This is just an opportunistic attack, and prime-time Hawaii Political Theatre at that…
The show must go on!
There’s another legitimate question hanging in the background of all this. Is the Senator getting good advice from his staff? His longevity has increased his power, but the turning of the seasons has left him without the honest sounding boards of his earlier years. Henry Giugni has passed on, and Patrick DeLeon is retired. Who among his staff of young whippersnappers is going to go into his office and say, “Senator, with all due respect, I think you are dead wrong on this issue.” Every human being on this earth needs someone to get in their grill once in a while and question them. Senator Inouye is no exception. Who can do this today?
You guys are not nice at all and I’m going to ask Mazie to come on line and provide a rebuttal. If I can find her that is.
AHEM. How to take the high road.
Do Hawaii Democrats, business leaders, establishment class, have a contingency plan for when Inouye retires?
In no short time Hawaii will be without one very serious and highly connected D.C. power broker.
Then what?
big mistake, Michael.
you’re not supposed to be thinking ahead, just play Monday morning quarterback…….
All Ben said was Dan was out of touch. Big Deal – much less offensive than what one of the Trask sisters said about him several years ago. And Dan replies with great indignation that he is deeply offended? Too funny.
Personally I think all of you are out of touch with how much local people appreciate all that Sen. Inouye has done for Hawaii and how little Gov. Cayetano has done in comparison.
I am not sure about that.
There was an article in the old Honolulu Advertiser or Star Bulletin by, I believe, Richard Borreca, on the status of Senator Inouye.
The article claimed that Inouye is a historical figure revered by his colleagues in Washington, D.C. The article went on to assert that Inouye is a respected and valued figure in Hawaii, but only in a utilitarian sense. If you mention Inouye’s name in Hawaii, people will instantly chirp “He’s bringing home the bacon and the frying pan to cook it up in as well!” The article argued that people in Hawaii generally do not know what a legend their senator really is on the national stage.
I think that idealistic people often project emotionally their idealism onto the population. Idealists dedicate their lives to the “people”, but most people, especially in a small town, are not idealistic.
There is also the error of projecting one’s idealism onto a politician who is almost purely pragmatic.
Senator Bob Dole of Kansas was wounded almost exactly as was Senator Inouye. In fact, they were in the hospital together after getting wounded in combat, and they would commiserate on their reduced career prospects. Both finally concluded, “Well, there’s always politics.” When Dole got back to Kansas, both political parties courted him, but he went with the Republicans purely because they were the majority. Dole’s voting record and public stances are all over the place (he was the original backer of food stamps, I think). It was often noted when Dole ran for president in 1996, that Dole was not a moderate, he was a pragmatist who would publicly take the right-wing party line of the Republicans in public but otherwise do in private whatever brought money to Kansas. One could say Dole is a RINO — Republican in Name Only. Likewise, one could say that Inouye is a pragmatic DINO; not necessarily a conservative or neo-con down deep (like Joseph Lieberman), but a professional politician dedicated to both public service and patronage. That’s his job. This is generally true for the older generation of senators, many of whom could belong to either political party, regardless of their public posturing. (Most of Inouye’s best friends are supposedly Republican senators of the older generation from places like Alaska.)
There is a sense out there that ideology has exploded into prominence in the political order with the end of the Cold War. There was a “Cold War consensus” across both political parties that seems to have collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union. There was a time when Senators like Inouye would confide in their colleagues “The enemy is not the Republicans. The enemy is the House.” Meaning, the two chambers of Congress would compete with one another for patronage, and ideology was secondary or sometimes not even on the horizon.
This is an incomplete understanding. The pollster Daniel Yankelovich has noted that if one studies changes in the value system of Americans who came of age in the 1960s, a radical convergence. Basically, the right-wing lost the ideological battles of the 1960s in terms of value systems. Sure, maybe in the 1980s there was a political backlash against the liberalism of the 1970s. But if one looks at the values that Americans have adopted since then, one finds a new uniformity. The only exception is to be found in private, personal matters, generally dealing with sexuality, for example, with same-sex marriage and abortion.
Even in something like abortion, however, one could argue that the pro-life lobby opposition to abortion is “more honored in the breach than in the observance”. That is, conservatives get abortions and use birth control, too. In fact, there was an article a year or so ago on nightclubs dominated by the young, Ivy-educated elite who are on the political track. The young Democrats go to Harvard, the young Republicans go to Yale, and that seems about the only difference between the two groups. When the bouncers at the club for the young Democratic elite asked how they act, they stated “They get drunk, snort coke, and have sex with strangers.” When the bouncers at the club for the young Republican elite asked how they acted, they answered “They get drunk, snort coke, and have sex with strangers.” Radical convergence.
What we find at work is what Sigmund Freud referred to the “narcissism of minor difference”. The great hatreds in history were not based on difference, but on similarity. There was much more hostility between Catholics and Protestants than there was between gentiles and Jews. The real hate was between southern Germans and northern Germans, Freud asserts, and between the Spanish and the Portuguese. Because they are so similar, they have to deny the similarity with force in order to reinforce the boundaries.
This helps to explain the Clinton-hating of the 1990s. Bill Clinton got into and stayed in office by appropriating and moderating the Republican agenda. This neutralized the Republicans and sent them into a fury. (Ironically, Democrats in Congress, unhappy with Clinton’s policies, voted for those policies because Republicans were so full of hate for Clinton.) It’s classic narcissism of minor difference. This might also help to explain the “birther” controversy which asserts that Obama is a foreigner, when in fact so many of his policies seem to be Bush’s old policies, only carried out with sobriety.
We need a “follow” button next to contributors names. I’d like to follow Skeptical’s posts.
I have no problem with what Ben said, taken in its entirety and adjusted to account for Ben’s style. Pacific Resource Partnership are trying to blow it up into an embarrassing, damaging gaffe. But it ain’t.
But I am put off by the counter-exaggerations attacking Inouye as if he “thinks he is a king.” Nonsense. He is a US Senator. And last I checked, a US Senator in ANY state has a great deal of clout, especially one with seniority and strong victory margins.
The “Inouye is arrogant” criticisms are infantile and provide pretty clear evidence the people making them are uninformed and rude. Inouye’s response was no more inappropriate than Ben’s initial remark. Both are to be expected. It was John White’s attempt to milk this as if it is important which is out of whack. Along with the rude sniping at Inouye from the childish.
Kolea-
I agree with you that Sen. Inouye doesn’t think he’s king. I have no beef with the Senator. All things considered, I think he’s as humble as they come in relationship to his power level.
What’s funny is that all the small politicians in Hawaii think he is King, as we can see every election year when they try and get his blessing. They are the ones making Inouye look bad. He doesn’t want to anoint, but they want to be anointed.
agree with this.
There has been a bit of debate on how “in touch” the older generation of leaders are today.
For instance, there was recently a conference on how to measure economic growth. Originally, it was common to simply count rail road cars in a country. Later, with reservations, economists created a measure known as “gross national product” — basically counting how much money is in a country. Nepal, by contrast, uses the yardstick of “gross domestic happiness”. It sounds flaky, but some economists find it better to include things like health and education levels rather than just dollars to measure the economic strength of a country. At the conference there was a huge divide between younger participants who take this new measure seriously and the older economists who seemed bored. The economic crisis had a bigger impact among the young than the older generation assumes in terms of value development.
Along those lines, the co-founder of Pay Pal, Peter Thiel, has set up a fellowship to encourage college students to drop out of college and set up their own enterprises. His theory is that the best and brightest today are those who go to elite universities and then drop out. The older generation of the elite, especially Baby Boomers, went to the best schools and were fast-tracked into leadership and are, Thiel thinks, out of touch and uncreative. For instance, the middle class has disappeared in the US for the past 40 years, and the elite know about this in the abstract but don’t understand the huge ramifications or have any ideas on what to do.
Instead of asking how out of touch with the public Senator Inouye might be, it might be instructive to ask the same of Governor Abercrombie. When asked why his attitudes toward development have seemed to have radically changed over the years, Abercrombie asserted that he belonged to an earlier generation that had different ideas about growth. Abercrombie at least belonged to a generation that grew up with the idea of “paradigm shifts”, and so his thinking can be self-conscious. That there was a certain self-critical element in the air in the 1960s is a huge strong point for Abercrombie’s generation and for the society as a whole.
Not everyone got that. When the economy was falling apart in 2008, presidential candidate John McCain asserted publicly that the fundamentals of the US economy were sound. From that very moment, he decisively lost the election to Obama. But why would he say such a thing? He actually believed it. In some sense, the 1960s did not happen for him, since he was “tied up at the time” (as he likes to joke). He lacks a certain instinctual doubt or skepticism about the status quo that is now automatic in ordinary people.
One question worth asking might be whether Hawaii missed the 1960s as well. Was there really a civil rights movement in Hawaii? Or anything? Doesn’t look like it on the whole. It might be that Hawaii went from the happy conformity of the 1950s to the sleaze of the 1970s without any intervening period of rebellion and questioning. There is a sense that the old order really was not overturned, it was merely opened up for new managers. That’s an interesting question, because that might mean that Abercrombie — who used to be labeled a “pot-smoking hippy” in past elections — is more in touch with reality than the majority in the elite or in the majority. He could be one of the few people in Hawaii whose thinking has evolved.
That also puts the big projects in Hawaii into a new light.
Millions of years ago, when the earth’s atmosphere began to slowly cool, the adaption made by dinosaur species was to grow larger and larger to retain more body heat. This giganticism might seem like a kind of “progress” to a school boy who views their enormous skeletons, but it’s a sign of doom. The big projects in Hawaii likewise might be a latter-day sign of the old order re-branding itself (again), this time by getting BIGGER.
The primary problem with the big projects might not be the projects themselves, but the thinking behind them, which might not have evolved that much over the decades. But if something like a serious tech sector or film industry emerges in someplace like Kakaako, it might represent the dawn of some very divergent thinking.
Skeptical, you make a great point.
For a big project to get done in today’s political world, it needs support from powerful blocs. That power may be in the form of money, or political foot soldiers, or something else. It may be a multibillion dollar weapons system that the Pentagon doesn’t even want, or the rescue of an auto industry, or the construction of a rail system. But big projects by definition have an established, powerful constituency to push them through.
This also means that big projects by definition are yesterday’s solution to yesterday’s problem, projected forward. Sometimes you get lucky and yesterday’s solution still works. But not always.
The rail solves two of yesterday’s problems: putting construction workers to work, and cramming more hotel, retail, and office workers into the Downtown/Waikiki core. (more skeptically, putting victims of our broken educational system to work)
How much would we reduce our collective carbon footprint if we instead invested $5 billion in providing superfast internet connections to every house on Oahu? If we created, over the course of the next two decades, an educated workforce that could produce high level work for east coast and European based companies on a time-shifted basis?
I work for a firm that off-shores some back office functions to India, and has for several years. I can tell you that large firms are unhappy with the quality level of the work you get, and the price of the shoddy work is rising. Additionally, everyone recognizes that global political risk is increasing. There is potential for a lot of bad, destabilizing things to happen in the next 10 or 20 years.
But this kind of industry (skilled white collar business support) doesn’t exist in any large scale in Hawaii. So they can’t lobby for the things that would make this happen. But construction firms, construction unions, and their bought and paid for elected officials… they do exist in spades. So we will keep producing yesterday’s solutions to yesterday’s problems… leading us to be trapped in yesterday.