Last night’s Island Insights on PBS Hawaii featured a good discussion of the current campaign season.
Richard Borreca, political reporter for the Star-Advertiser and now perhaps the senior political writer among the current crop of reporters, had a couple of very good points that I jotted down.
Republicans have fielded candidates in almost every race, and, according to Richard, they say that nearly all of their new candidates are “faith based.”
That’s a bit of information that I imagine will scare you or inspire you, depending on your assessment of the political views of the communities of faith.
Then came Richard’s comment about Governor Linda Lingle. It was something close to this: “I’ve never seen a governor who was as accessible as Lingle who I learned as little from.”
He described Lingle’s technique of sloughing off questions, sidestepping with strategic “I don’t know” ploys.
It’s interesting to see how much media relations and techniques of influencing news coverage have changed since statehood. Now it’s all control by information gatekeepers, rigidly defined political messages, staying on point, holding information tight.
By coincidence, this week I heard from Paul Dommel, who was a reporter for UPI in Washington before joining the Star-Bulletin as a political reporter in the early 1960s, covering the legislature and politics in general. During the 1962 campaign, he was close to the campaigns of Dan Inouye and Tom Gill.
After Gill’s election to a term in Congress, Dommel served as his administrative assistant in Washington, comparable to today’s chief of staff.
He wrote:
I must tell you it was an interesting time to be a reporter in Hawaii.
Not to bore you, but a story I keep telling is that I was only in Hawaii for about two weeks when I got invited to play poker with Governor Quinn at Washington Place. The game also included Brian Casey and Jack Teehan who were political reporters for the Advertiser.
Where else but in Hawaii would a new arrival get to play poker with the Governor.
Quinn, of course, was the last Republican governor until Lingle’s two terms. It’s hard to think of a starker contrast between their contrasting approaches to the press. With the passage of time, the game has totally changed.
And I wonder whether today’s editors would allow political reporters to “pal around” with the governor in this way? What do you think?
You might also want to check out Dommel’s new blog, Liberal Dog (charley-liberaldog.blogspot.com), for some very good writing on current political issues.