That seems to be the campaign theme of Congressman Kai Kahele, who finally made public his long-signalled intent to make a late run for governor.

The rumors began making news early this year, and continued pretty much unabated for months. And unacknowledged by Kahele, who never made himself available to comment on the rumors or respond to reporters questions.

From the reporting, it also appears that the event to officially announce his gubernatorial run was also structured to avoid questions.

And, it seems to me, this strategy of making statements while safely away from public scrutiny is a big red flag.

After all, as they say, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. In that case, I have to conclude that Kahele as governor would be as aloof and secretive as, well, as he has been as a member of Congress.

And in terms of past behavior, the public campaign statement issued on his behalf, which states his opposition to several practices, is startlingly at odds with his past behavior as a candidate and public official.

—Ban on fundraisers during the legislative session. During two terms as a legislator, Senator Kahele made full use of session fundraisers, according to campaign records. During his first session in 2016, he held two fundraisers while the legislature was in session, one in Wailuku and another at the Mandalay Restaurant downtown, a favorite spot for meeting and greeting lobbyists. In 2017, two more session fundraisers, the only fundraisers he held during the year. And ditto in 2018, with his only two fundraisers scheduled during the session.

-Prohibiting union-to-candidate contributions. Again, Kahele’s record shows absolutely no prior leaning in this direction, making his campaign rhetoric seem hollow.

You can look up his record of campaign contributions at the Campaign Spending Commission website. I’m traveling and don’t have access to my own version of the contribution data, but it appears that Kahele’s top 15 campaign contributors during his years as a legislator included ten unions, three large corporations, a hotel company, and a political consultant/lobbyist.

—capping campaign warchests. Well, that’s one way to try to turn a huge negative—a campaign trying to get started just a few months before the primary election, with at least two other candidates way ahead in collecting the funds necessary to run a statewide campaign. He’s trying to launch a campaign after a whole lot of money has been sucked out of the system by other candidates. So claim it’s a matter of principle, so that it doesn’t immediately appear to simply be a sign of luke warm support, at best, for his candidacy.

In any case, as you can tell, I’m highly skeptical of Kahele’s candidacy. His failure to follow-through on campaign pledges made during his campaign for the 2nd District seat in Congress, his failur to take questions from reporters over a long period, and his own past practices in campaign fundraising, all undermine the progressive sounds coming from his campaign apparatus.

“As me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.” As one online source frames it, the phrase means “implies that you will likely tell a lie, because you do not want to tell the truth.”

Civil Beat’s Nick Grube took a devastating look yesterday at US Representative Kai Kahele’s absence from Washington, where the work of Congress is being done without him (“Has US Rep. Kai Kahele Given Up On Washington?“).

Grube reminds readers of the irony of one of Kahele’s central campaign themes in his successful 2020 run against then Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.

“What Hawaii needs is a full time representative in Congress who will show up and whose sole focus is fighting on behalf of the people of the 2nd Congressional District,” Kahele said. “That’s the message I will be bringing to the people of Hawaii.”

But instead, Kahele quickly turned his back on that pledge.

Kahele’s absence has not gone unnoticed, according to two Washington-based lobbyists who spoke to Civil Beat on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do so by their firms.

Congress is now in the middle of appropriations season and members are crafting their requests for federal dollars.

The lobbyists said Kahele’s office has been slow to seek these requests for the upcoming year when compared to other members, including Case, who sits on the Appropriations Committee.

There are also concerns that Kahele is not fully engaged with his committees, which oversee transportation and the military, two critical topics for Hawaii, and that his office has done little to pick up the slack for him while he’s been gone.

Both lobbyists used the same word to describe the response coming out of Kahele’s office when it comes to scheduling meetings or discussing major policy initiatives, such as the National Defense Authorization Act that sets the policy agenda for the U.S. military — “Crickets.”

“This is a significant departure from how they operated in the past,” one of the lobbyists said. “The office always had a work ethic, but it’s obvious that they decided not to show up anymore.”

The story was quickly picked up by the NY Post (“Hawaii Democratic rep avoids DC votes to fly commercial planes: report“), Politico (“Kai Kahele is still a pilot on “occasional flights” for Hawaiian Airlines while a member of Congress“), and the Washington Examiner (“Democratic Rep. Kai Kahele of Hawaii has not voted in person since January“). [Sorry for the confusion with the NY Post link…it should be fixed now.]

This is priceless material for opposition researchers in the event Kahele does end up making a gubernatorial bid.

But with the primary just four months away, and three top tier Democratic candidates already in the race, it gets harder and harder to take the “talk” of a “possible” run seriously.

In a Facebook post, a Kahele defender made the opposite case.

Personally, I’d rather have my elected officials home in the district & voting by proxy. This article basically interviews two national defense industry lobbyists who are shaming him for not spending his time chatting with them in DC. They’re not his constituents, he doesn’t owe them anything. “Look at him, spending time with farmers on the big island when he was supposed to be at Biden’s State of The Union” (a largely ceremonial speech that’s recorded and broadcast online so he can watch anytime).”

The problem with this view is that, like it or not, Congressional politics takes place in Congress. Individual members of congress can’t successfully press Hawaii’s interests by holding photo ops here in Hawaii. It takes the work of building relationships there in Congress to move legislation that will benefit Hawaii. This can’t be done solo. This was the job he signed up for and pledged to do for us. And apparently is not doing.

No, Kahele doesn’t “owe” the lobbyists quoted in the story anything. But he’s not just stiffing the “defense industry lobbyists.” There are a lot of public interest lobbyists, including those pressing Hawaii issues at the federal level, who he is also letting down by his absence. His constituents have been essentially left unrepresented.

If he wanted to run for governor this year, he should have followed the example of Neil Abercrombie, who resigned his seat in Congress at the beginning of January 2010 in order to run for governor. He didn’t pretend to be representing Hawaii in Washington while actually campaigning at home.

Today I downloaded the database containing contributions to Hawaii noncandidate committees between January 1, 2008 and December 18, 2021. It’s available for download at https://opendata.hawaii.gov/.

State law defines a noncandidate committee:

“Noncandidate committee” means an organization, association, party, or individual that has the purpose of making or receiving contributions, making expenditures, or incurring financial obligations to influence the nomination for election, or the election, of any candidate to office, or for or against any question or issue on the ballot….”

The category includes corporations, unions, and political action committees. As you will see, it also includes groups like ActBlue which process earmarked contributions to candidates.

After downloading, I loaded the file into Filemaker, a database app that I use on my MacBook Pro. After a bit of eyeballing the data, I decided to see which committees took in the most money over the three year period from 2019-2021, which included the 2020 election and the run-up to this year’s election.

The database lists all the contributions received, which are primarily transfers of funds from their parent or related organizations, and I’ve included a count of the number of contributions received. The ones showing high counts are traditional political action committees which solicit contributions from members or affiliated donors.

Here’s a list of the top noncandidate committees ranked by total contributions received.

The top ranked committee, Hawaii Carpenters Market Recovery Program Fund PAC, actually paid out virtually all of its funds to another associated committee, “Be Change Now.”

To look up the campaign spending reports filed by any committee, just go over to the Campaign Spending Commisisson website.

And to go beyond the Top 40, here’s a full list of all reporting noncandidate committees. Again, this reflects contributions received between 2008 and December 18, 2021.

A reader left a comment on yesterday’s post that seems worth sharing as a post:

“Gosh, isn’t that Yamasaki feller the chairman of the Stadium Authority? Isn’t that the site of the state’s biggest redevelopment project?”

What do ya know!

Bingo.

So two of the eight Stadium Authority members are among the dozen individuals who contributed the most to state and local political candidates last year, and a third may be a family member of another in the Top 40.

In addition to serving as chair of the Stadium Authority, Ross Yamasaki is also registered as a lobbyist for 16 clients. This listing appears on the lobbyist registration database of the State Ethics Commission.