That did not take long. Within a 24 hour period after Inouye speaks out, there is this sudden about face by this lynch mob.

This might be one of the primary reasons Inouye does not want to retire. He truly is the voice of reason in Hawaii. It’s like what Obama said about the Bush administration, that they need adult supervision. Without Inouye, the monkeys take over the zoo.

It’s been repeatedly stated by observers that Dan Inouye does not control politics in Hawaii, that he works far away and doesn’t really have that much local clout. What power he has locally derives largely from the imagined power that local politicians think he has. The illusion of power has a power in itself, and authority figures often cultivate this illusion (e.g., Donald Trump). But Inouye does not cultivate this illusion, it’s local politicians who cultivate it unconsciously for him. They throw themselves at his feet seeking his blessing, even when it won’t have any effect.

But there might be something else going on. These politicians themselves desire leadership. It’s just like Caesar Milan says about dogs, that they crave a hierarchy, even if that means they will be at the bottom of it, because that is better than uncertainty and chaos.

This might be human nature, too. People need hierarchy. So we all need things like religion or ideology, because even if our beliefs are egalitarian and opposed to hierarchy, the belief itself becomes our master. Likewise, HL Mencken said that the first thing people do when given their freedom is to imitate their neighbors, so that the ‘norm’ becomes the new master eagerly obeyed, even while the old political authority is despised. (Hence, people spend a fortune on big cars and houses.) And that’s America, a passionately individualistic and egalitarian society full of obedient sheep who are unaware of their slavishness.

So slavishness is not the problem with Hawaii’s politicians. We’re all like that. The problem is a total lack of basic common sense. It’s a very distorted, uninformed, naive and provincial view of the world they have. That some of these “leaders” went to elite schools seems to have only put them deeper within a bubble within a bubble.

I don’t suppose that the fact that the task group chair, Larry Rodriguez, was Howard Todo’s boss at Ernst and Young for 13 years had anything to do with it.

Nah.