A story in today’s Star-Advertiser looks at House Speaker Calvin Say’s district, where he faces two challengers in the General Election. They are Republican Julia Allen, who has repeatedly run unsuccessfully against Say, and Green Party candidate Keiko Bonk, a former Hawaii County Council member and well known progressive.
Say has won handily in recent elections, as the results below show.
2010 General Election
(D) SAY, Calvin K.Y. 5,907 70.3%
(R) ALLEN, Julia E. 2,086 24.8%2008 General Election
(D) SAY, Calvin K. Y. 7,129 73.5%
(R) ALLEN, Julia E. 1,916 19.7%2006 General Election
(D) SAY, Calvin K.Y. 5,657 72.8%
(R) ALLEN, Julia E. 1,844 23.7%
However, there’s a wild card in the race–the active campaign support Bonk is getting from the hotel workers union, Unite Here Local 5, via their independent political expenditure committee, or Super PAC, Aikea.
Since the beginning of the year, the UNITE HERE TIP State and Local – Hawaii PAC has contributed $130,000 to Aikea. Beginning in July, Aikea has had paid canvassers as well as volunteers going door to door, according to its report for the period Januaary 1 through July 27, 2012.
Unite Here’s website has a brief description of Aikea and its history.
Here’s part of a recent email to Aikea supporters:
Thanks for joining us at the Aikea meeting and on Saturday. We had our best numbers to date (2 dozen more yes than no votes, and knocked on 600 doors). We’ve knocked on nearly 4,000 doors and every day there is a growing number of people who care about the future of Hawaii and are calling for a repeal of Act 55, the Public Land Development Corporation. This is encouraging in a race where we are up against 36 years of Calvin Say, who has the power to block a repeal of PLDC being heard if he stays Speaker of the House, during the January Legislative Session.
We are asking if each of you can help in this important race, by contacting people you know who live in House District 20 (friend to friend), joining us in our sign waving days, and posting messages on
Facebook to reach people in the District.
And in the latest update delivered on Friday:
– Our latest numbers reflect that we’ve knocked on over 6,000 doors! We’ve actually talked to an additional 2,700 people in HD 20 about our new political movement – AiKea. Of the total number of ID’s we’ve made. The number of “YES” for AiKea and Keiko is now just about 9 percentage points behind those favoring Calvin. But of that same total number of ID’s, close to 50% are undecided. A huge majority of these undecided votes have been identified and moved away from their initial support for Calvin because of our message on AiKea and the PLDC. This is why all of you are so key!
– Keiko cover story in Honolulu Weekly.
– In addition to our full-time crew; a total of 91 (4-hour) volunteer shifts have been completed by Community and Local 5 Members. Student leaders from UHM, LCC, and HPU have also joined us.
– Two additional AiKea mailers will be reaching voters in the next two weeks.
– Banners and yard signs are available for those that live or know someone that would be willing to put one up on their property.
– We have three sign waving sessions still scheduled all from 7:30 – 8:30 am.: Friday, Nov. 2nd (Near McDonalds across Sacred Hearts); Monday, Nov. 5th (2nd/Waialae near City Mill); Tuesday, Nov. 6th (Near McDonalds across Sacred Hearts).
That’s a lot of people on the ground working for Bonk.
Aikea also has a Facebook presence, with photos of their campaigners.
This is a race to watch.
time to share a classic of campaigning. It is 40 years old but sounds like today, albeit candidates have someone else do their dirty work. I am surprised Cayetano hasn’t been hit with this.
Guaranteed Effective All-Occasion Non-Slanderous Political Smear Speech
By Bill Garvin
MAD #139, December 1970
My fellow citizens, it is an honor and a pleasure to be here today. My opponent has openly admitted he feels an affinity toward your city, but I happen to like this area. It might be a salubrious place to him, but to me it is one of the nation’s most delightful garden spots.
When I embarked upon this political campaign I hoped that it could be conducted on a high level and that my opponent would be willing to stick to the issues. Unfortunately, he has decided to be tractable instead — to indulge in unequivocal language, to eschew the use of outright lies in his speeches, and even to make repeated veracious statements about me.
At first, I tried to ignore these scrupulous, unvarnished fidelities. Now I do so no longer. If my opponent wants a fight, he’s going to get one !
It might be instructive to start with his background. My friends, have you ever accidentally dislodged a rock on the ground and seen what was underneath ? Well, exploring my opponent’s background is dissimilar. All the slime and filth and corruption you could possibly imagine, even in your wildest dreams, are glaringly nonexistent in this man’s life. And even during his childhood !
Let us take a very quick look at that childhood: It is a known fact that, on a number of occasions, he emulated older boys at a certain playground. It is also known that his parents not only permitted him to masticate excessively in their presence, but even urged him to do so. Most explicable of all, this man who poses as a paragon of virtue exacerbated his own sister while they were both teenagers !
I ask you, my fellow Americans: is this the kind of person we want in public office to set an example for our youth ? Of course, it’s not surprising that he should have such a typically pristine background — no, not when you consider the other members of his family:
His female relatives put on a constant pose of purity and innocence, and claim they are inscrutable, yet every one of them has taken part in hortatory activities
The men in the family are likewise completely amenable to moral suasion
My opponent’s second cousin is a Mormon
His uncle was a flagrant heterosexual
His sister, who has always been obsessed by sects, once worked as a proselyte outside a church
His father was secretly chagrined at least a dozen times by matters of a pecuniary nature
His youngest brother wrote an essay extolling the virtues of being a homosapien
His great-aunt expired from a degenerative disease
His nephew subscribes to a phonographic magazine
His wife was a thespian before their marriage and even performed the act in front of paying customers
And his own mother had to resign from a women’s organization in her later years because she was an admitted sexagenarian
Now what shall we say of the man himself ?
I can tell you in solemn truth that he is the very antithesis of political radicalism, economic irresponsibility, and personal depravity. His own record proves that he has frequently discountenanced treasonable, un-American philosophies and has perpetrated many overt acts as well.
He perambulated his infant son on the street
He practiced nepotism with his uncle and first cousin
He attempted to interest a 13-year-old girl in philately
He participated in a seance at a private residence where, among other odd goings-on, there was incense
He has declared himself in favor of more homogeneity on college campuses
He has advocated social intercourse in mixed company — and has taken part in such gatherings himself
He has been deliberately averse to crime in our streets
He has urged our Protestant and Jewish citizens to develop more catholic tastes
Last summer he committed a piscatorial act on a boat that was flying the American flag
Finally, at a time when we must be on our guard against all foreign “isms”, he has coolly announced his belief in altruism — and his fervent hope that some day this entire nation will be altruistic !
I beg you, my friends, to oppose this man whose life and work and ideas are so openly and avowedly compatible with our American way of life. A vote for him would be a vote for the perpetuation of everything we hold dear.
The facts are clear; the record speaks for itself.
Do your duty.
Ulu, that is too good!
Will the Democratic Party of Hawaii sanction or throw out the members of the Hawaii Democratic LBGT Caucus for violation of party rules against endorsing a political candiate that is not a “Democrat”? It seems that they are clearly not “good Democrats” for not endorsing the Democratic Party’s nominee according to the Star Advertiser’s article this morning.
The embattled HD 40 house candidate Chris Manabat is enjoying a direct mail blitz courtesy of Calvin Say’s Citizens for Responsive Government. Rumor has it that Manabat’s mother, Rida Cabanilla, has sold Say the family votes for speaker…if he can save her kid. According to Dante, Manabat isn’t even a valid Democratic candidate.
I’ve lived in Calvin’s district since 1987 and will be voting for Keiko. Calvin has been part of the problem for years.
Well I’ve lived on the B.I. since ’73 and know Keiko and her family. I wouldn’t wish her narrowmindness on anybody, beware fleeing the familiar for the unknown.
She is a performance artist and playing at politics is fun for her, but it’s our actual lives.
Say is a mixed bag, but at least he’s a grownup( the only one the past two years) at the Capitol who knows how to move the process.
I don’t want to imagine this Senate, with this Gov, having a Dissident Speaker, even if it’s rolling old Speaker Joe back up to the podium.
Keiko’s father was a well respected professor and a very strong supporter of Tom Gill. Maybe that is the tie between Aikea, which is run by Eric Gill.
Get your facts straight. Keiko has been involved full time or part time in politics for nearly 40 years and has consistently fought against the corporate big money guys that dominate Hawaii politics. Politics is not a job for her, it is a moral calling. She and her family have been at the cutting edge of progressive politics in Hawaii since Hawaii has been a state. They helped elect a lot of the state’s current democrats, but stopped supporting the ones that gave into the corporate money. She is a painter not a performance artist. Although she is also a singer. She has worked in nonprofits fighting for the little guy and the environment for the last 20 years, and spends at least 25% of her salary on supporting progressive political causes in Hawaii. Her enemies respect her political skills enough to regularly offer to pay her way in politics if she will just “play ball.” She keeps saying no. She has led several successful state and federal investigations into government corruption. Calvin on the other hand has been at the center or hanging around with the the people involved in just about every form of corruption in Hawaii for three decades. Aikea is more than Local 5, but Local 5 is its heart and sole. They are supporting Keiko because of decades of front line work for ordinary people. Keiko and her family supported Tom Gill, and his widow supports Keiko. Eric Gill is finest union leader in the state and so it makes sense that he would support her, since they both chose the hard path and decided to work for the average guy rather than the corporations.
AiKea (I care). It’s a clever play on the Ainokea (I no care) phrase.
Joan Allen should encourage her supporters to vote for Keiko. Perhaps then Say can be retired!
Correction, Julia Allen, who has heard of her? Keiko Bonk is known.
Thanks so much for your Hawaii Monitor article today. It reflected exactly what I was thinking about yesterday after reading this post on Monday. In fact, it was rather unnerving finding my thoughts on paper!
The labor-corporate alliance in Hawaii reminds me of what I have heard about Canadian politics. There is a very powerful alliance in Canada between corporations in Canada involved in resource extraction (oil, timber, etc.) and their unions. On the one hand, the corporations have to pay their workers much more to maintain this alliance, but, on the other hand, this coalition is politically unstoppable.
The environment pays the price for this. (In fact, a retired US Forestry worker once told me that the only man-made object visible to the naked eye from the moon are the clear cuts made in Canadian forests.) So we may view Canada as a model of a socially progressive society, but much of the funding of those social programs comes from rampant natural resource exploitation that can shock even Americans. Also, Canada is thus dependent on raw material export to the US, almost on a colonial model. So, when the US home-building industry discovered that there are only so many houses Americans can afford to buy and only so much land to build on, Canadians then discovered that there is only so much timber they can cut down and sell. They eventually ran up against their natural limits.
This might be the kind of bind that the corporate-union alliance in Hawaii is now facing. Hence their need to create questionable grand public projects and bypass the rule of law. But if they do get all that they want, in ten years (or even five years) they’ll be back to square one, demanding more. It’s a denial of basic geographic reality.
This reminds me of the scene in the Godfather where Vito Corleone meets with the Five Families to end their war. He warns the other mafioso that narcotics will ultimately bring down the mafia, because while the public and politicians may turn a blind eye on vices like prostitution and gambling and liquor, drugs kill innocents. Another don stands up and says that he tried to ban his men from selling drugs, but the profits are so great that they do it anyway in secret. Well, that just means that the mafia is doomed, just like Don Vito said. Likewise, in this election, the home-building unions are revealing their true nature as in league with the devil. Inevitably, nature will run its course and these unions will become distasteful to many progressives and educated voters in general. Unfortunately, real unions like the hotel workers — who are not highly compensated, nor in cahoots with corporations, and who do support genuinely progressive candidates — may get tarnished in the public backlash.
Another problem is, what now? Where’s the New Economy in Hawaii? The political leadership in Hawaii are so old that they seem confused by all the ruckus against (illegal) land development and bogus projects. It’s like a scene in the TV show “Mad Men” where there are black people protesting in the streets below, and an ad executive lets out a big sigh full of anxiety, and says “When are things going to get back to normal?”