Lee Cataluna’s column over at Civil Beat today provides an interesting review of the history of impatience on the part of Hawaii’ representatives in Congress (“Lee Cataluna: The Risky Business Of Political Ambition“).
Bottom line: The success rate among our Congressional representatives trying to jump for higher office is small, and there have been some dramatic flameouts.
She tracks back to the likes of Spark Matsunaga, Patsy Mink, Cec Heftel, and Pat Saiki, then on to Neil Abercrombie, Mazie Hirono, and Tulsi Gabbard.
She overlooked two other examples, Mufi Hannemann and Ed Case.
Case served two terms in the House after being first elected in 2002, then resigned and made an unsuccesful challenge to US Senator Dan Akaka. Case ran in a special election in 2010 to replace Neil Abercrombie, who resigned in order to come home and run for governor. Case lost the special election, then lost in the regular Democratic Primary to Colleen Hanabusa. Case then ran again for US Senate in 2012, but again lost, this time to Mazie Hirono. It wasn’t until the 2018 election that case finally found the votes to return to Congress.
Hannemann had a similar rough time. He lost the 1986 special election to fill the remaining term of Cec Heftel, who had resigned to run for governor, but won the Democratic Primary. He went on to lose in the General Election to Republican Pat Saiki. He ran for Congress again in 1990, this time in Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District, and lost again, this time to Patsy Mink.
Even though Hannemann then was elected to the Honolulu City Council, and went on to be elected mayor, he failed in two runs for governor (2010 and 2014), as well as another run for Congress in 2012, which he lost to Tulsi Gabbard. In 2020, he tried to repeat his earlier successful runs for Honolulu mayor, but was trounced in the primary, where he trailed badly, coming in 5th among the candidates.
Cataluna’s conclusion hits the nail on the head:
Perhaps the more genteel way to frame a calculated jump from the crowded Congress to a more high-profile gig is the desire to serve the people in the most effective way possible.
But it’s hard to imagine ambition isn’t always part of the equation. Ambition is like jet fuel. Not enough, and a person doesn’t go anywhere. Too much or badly managed, it leaks out and starts to poison the area around it, just like Red Hill, or it explodes, like the many Hawaii politicians who left their congressional seats and never won another election again.
In any case, the word that Rep. Kai Kahele is considering giving up his seat in Congress in order to run for governor, as Neil Abercrombie and Cec Heftel did earlier, makes Cataluna’s column a must read.
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Problem is, once someone gets elected into office, they start believing that they might actually be something special. Perfect example: Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. And most of the Hawaii state legislature.
We’ve been fortunate to have had two political leaders who went from Congress to the Honolulu City Council and back to Congress, one of them subsequently serving as governor.
I wrote to all of our US Congressional leaders in DC and to Gov Ige after the red hill fuel crisis first hit the news.
Rep. Kai Kahele was the very first to respond and with a personal email to me. I was very impressed. His office even called me TWICE with personal phone calls to ask me about the situation and to reassure me that his office was on it.
Caldwell is dead in the water, and there’s substantial political muscle that doesn’t favor Green. There’s also money looking for someplace to go.
Cayetano is still a wild card, but name recognition alone could make her a serious contender.
When Kahele announced his formulaic “ten point plan” for the state and indirectly but pointedly bashed Ige’s leadership, the only surprise was that it took the media several days to figure out he wants to run for governor. How fricken obvious does he have to be?
There’s still time for a whole raft of retreads, distractions, and also-rans to jump in and split the vote in ways that help some and hurt others, and that’s virtually guaranteed with an open seat. And then there’s that other party.
So Green is still top dog for now, but it could be anybody’s race. It sure would be nice to see a highly qualified candidate or two jump in for the right reasons. Or at least not entirely for the wrong reasons.
“There’s still time for a whole raft of retreads, distractions, and also-rans to jump in and split the vote in ways that help some and hurt others, and that’s virtually guaranteed with an open seat.”
Garans. I’ll be looking for Mufi and Hanabatta. As usual.
Kai is a talented guy but he’s still a newcomer to electoral politics. It would be really nice if he would settle down, figure out how to listen and learn from people who have been at it longer, and build a record of actually achieving things before he tries to run for higher office. Having a colossal ego may be a bit of an occupational hazard for a pilot/politician, but it will be a shame if he never applies his considerable abilities to actually doing the work.
Yeah, there is a certain irony in that getting a political dream job as a senator or representative in D.C. only feeds the flame of ambition. But there is also the shock for a novice politician who overnight climbs to that pinnacle of power when they realize that all these revered elite political leaders are really just ordinary people. Their old heroes speak on camera with an air of measured gravity, but when the fresh-faced newbie sees them in person rather than on television, the newbie begin to realize that anybody could do this. Then one day it hits newbie like a ton of bricks: “I could do this!!” Then newbie cannot sleep at night, newbie is on fire with ambition. In fact, if you look at the career of politicians, they were often ordinary people with no particular interest in politics who by chance got an internship in DC, and soon thereafter ran for office.