This past Saturday morning was perhaps the lowest point ever reached by the currently Linda Lingle-controlled Republican Party of Hawaii in perhaps 25 years. During a surreal and highly disturbing two-hour meeting, which revealed the worst in party politics, Lingle's empire struck back against the party's own official platform committee charged with revising and updating the governing document which sets forth official Republican policies for the state of Hawaii.
The committee was formally shut down and disbanded and its members were told that despite the weeks of hard work they put in, their services would no longer be needed. As a result, the party's existing platform, described by many as liberal and watered down, would be retained verbatim in favor of the changes proposed by reformers who were ready to do battle with long-time party insiders and, in particular, those on the official Lingle administration gravy train.
Several weeks ago, these platform committee members (including me), who were selected from 51 state house districts at precinct caucuses and district meetings statewide, began thoughtfully deliberating about which positions the party and its candidates should take on virtually every issue affecting Hawaii. These so-called "planks" of the platform run the complete gamut of societal challenges: from jobs and the economy to the environment and government affairs; from affordable housing and social services to education and health care; from crime and public safety to senior citizens and native Hawaiian issues.
After 54 unbroken years of Democrat party domination of Hawaii's State Legislature, a majority of the members who showed up for these meetings week after week -- and at specially scheduled meetings in-between those weekly ones, not to mention hundreds of emails and phone calls back and forth -- expressed a clear and overwhelming desire to return to the party's conservative roots; favoring smaller government, lower taxes, greater preference for private sector solutions to social problems, increased transparency in what government does and what government spends, plus equal rights for all who call Hawaii home.
It was this very last issue which was the most controversial, as a large number of delegates to the platform committee desired to amend the party's current "Native Hawaiian plank" which essentially favors the Akaka Government Reorganization Bill (currently pending before the U.S. Senate); legislation which would break up the state along ethnic lines and create a new, ethnically exclusive Hawaiians-only OHA government funded by all taxpayers; a whole new layer of politicians and bureaucracy, which would duplicate most, if not all, services and departments provided by existing county, state and federal governments ... the only difference being that the 50th State's part-Hawaiian citizens (no matter how intermarried they are with non-Hawaiians here and abroad) would forever receive entitlements based on their ancestry, while non-Hawaiians would forever pick up the tab for such largesse. This was the pro-Akaka Bill position of Gov. Lingle and everyone knew it would be hard to change.
Adding to the controversy, caused by the platform committee's willingness to even consider changing the party's position while Lingle kept her tight grip on the party's power structure, were the revelations that at least one member of the platform committee -- Bruss Keppeler, an activist lawyer, a major player in the sovereignty movement and a friend of Lingle -- was an active contributor to Democrat campaigns and an active endorser of Democrats who ran against Republicans.
This controversy heated up platform committee meetings and fueled a constant, furious spate of emails between committee members on this subject alone. I, Eric Ryan, filed an official complaint with party chair Willes Lee about the propriety of having someone who actively plays for the other team help write our official playbook. To the justifiable horror of many, Lee made it abundantly clear in a variety of ways that he was under orders from Linda Lingle to circle the wagons around major Akaka-contributor Keppeler, since he was personally responsible for adding Lingle's pro-Akaka Bill language to our party's platform several years earlier ... and that Lee was supposed to keep Keppeler on the committee to protect that policy endorsement during the group's deliberations ... even though Lee had to go out of his way to pretend that he didn't know about the explicit party rules against party leaders like Keppeler who clearly engaged in traitorous behavior to actively defeat Republicans.
Tensions grew even higher during the last few weeks alone as reformers of the platform (and of the party) strived to reposition and re-energize the party so that its candidates would stop losing in election after election. Despite the prolonged, Lingle-mandated experimentation with pandering to local voters by trying to be "Lite versions of Democrats" while intentionally opting not to use marketing and grassroots activity to persuade voters that Republican ideas deserve a chance, defenders of the status quo platform (and of the party status quo in general) argued that Lingle's close first term election victory in 2002 and her coast to re-election (outspending her unknown opponent 20-to-1) in 2006 were evidence enough that the platform should be left alone.
The insiders' analysis conveniently overlooks the consistently poor showing by party challengers who take on incumbent Democrats year after year, and overlooks the consistent losing streak of elected Republicans who can't hang onto their seats when challenged by unknown Democrat challengers year after year. In other words, it doesn't matter how badly Republicans overall are losing, so long as Lingle is doing O.K. That was the entire justification for leaving the platform as is.
As for what specifically took place on Saturday, the hardworking platform committee members showed up at 9:30 a.m. for what was expected to be a productive meeting, during which several newly developed "planks" would be discussed and adopted. Instead, these brave members looked around and saw a couple dozen people who had never before shown up to meetings during the previous month or so; people with clear connections to the governor and who actually claimed to be voting members of the platform committee.
Lingle's leaders of the G.O.P., including party chair Willes Lee, platform committee chair Darwin Ching and vice chair Kay Ahina -- who like all the remaining vice-chairs of the party are all Lingle appointees to government posts -- quickly approved credentials and gave seats to these sudden newcomers as if they were old friends invited to dinner after many years (along with a few new acquaintances whose favors were being called in).
One of these people, Terry Thomason, is the party's attorney and husband of a Lingle former appointee at the Department of Accounting and General Services (DAGS). Shortly after the meeting started, chairman Ching recognized first-time attendee Mr. Thomason, who wasted no time in making a motion to end all further consideration of the platform by the committee, to throw away all their hard work, to consider no changes offered by the current committee (not a single one), and to adopt the existing Lingle-endorsed platform verbatim.
This motion, by a person who didn't even care to inquire about the changes that were being considered and championed by the current platform committee (e.g. "Hey everyone, since I've just shown up for the first time, can you tell me what ideas have y'all come up with over the past month?"), led to a loud and lively discussion about the offensive nature of this motion to rubber stamp the existing, Democrat Lite platform. Even a couple of the hardworking, actively participating members of the committee who admittedly were less-inclined to substantially change the platform during the month-long process by the working group found themselves speaking out against this overt, top-down, muscle-flexing by the governor's shameless underlings to stifle debate.
And so, once everyone had an opportunity to speak their mind, including yours truly, the empire struck back. By a vote of 26 to 19, the platform committee was shut down ahead of schedule because of the distinct possibility of changes being approved that Lingle didn't want ... and made possible by a bizarre yet unsurprising influx of warm bodies, courtesy of the Lingle campaign. In addition to the new, unfamiliar faces in person, there were new, unfamiliar voices on a conference call from the neighbor islands, joining together in a highly choreographed dance of death for the party's integrity and its promise for the future. It was frighteningly well-rehearsed and it was executed like clockwork.
"It's all about the Akaka Bill, that's why they're shutting down our committee," were the words on the lips of delegates and alternates to the platform committee. "Lingle doesn't want us to express the will of Republican voters statewide." After watching Lingle's men and women circle the wagons around an admitted Democrat supporter, Keppeler -- who worked to defeat Democrat Dan Akaka's Republican challenger Cynthia Thielen as recently as 2006, and who donated to Abercrombie and Akaka even more recently than that -- and then watching these Lingle loyalists work feverishly, in an unprecedented and offensive manner, to shut down the one committee that lets party regulars have their say about issues of the day, it became clear that the Republican Party of Hawaii was being stepped on and exploited to fulfill secret campaign promises made behind closed doors by Linda Lingle to the likes of OHA's Haunani Apoliona and even Sen. Dan Inouye.
For years, the political buzz was that Lingle secretly made a deal with OHA and leaders of the ethnic separatist movement that led to an understanding that they would support her run for governor if she would embrace the liberal Democrat policies of creating a separate, unnecessary government for part-Hawaiians merely by pretending that Hawaiians were a lost Indian tribe. The same kind of shafting of Republican principles that was in evidence when Lingle lent her support to the tax increases and big spending associated with rail transit, the abandonment of tax cuts, and the giveaways to government employee unions.
As an encore to the party's dance of death, just 30 minutes after the curtain came down on the platform committee and its members were kicked to the curb and told their help would no longer be needed, party chair Willes Lee sent out a misleading eblast to thousands of Republicans in Hawaii, which was intentionally worded to leave the false impression that the members of the platform committee were so happy with the existing document adopted 2 years earlier that the committee was happily calling it quits to embrace that document after weeks of consideration.
Word has it that these aforementioned warm bodies who made this unholy "rubber stamp" vote possible were rounded up by a phone tree at party headquarters during the days leading up to Saturday's travesty and were given explicit instructions to show up and vote for Mr. Thomason's motion without hesitation. Some were even given encouragement to speak derisively to those reformers in attendance, who were clearly outmaneuvered by their own party leaders. These so-called leaders, all of whom report to Linda Lingle, are fully expected to utilize spin doctoring against the Democrats. But this weekend, they were using that spin against the party's own rank and file membership. These hacks obviously know which side their bread is buttered on.
Looking back, watching Willes "Slick Willie" Lee working in concert with Lingle's underlings, puppets and minions in a well-choreographed attempt to stifle debate, squelch free speech and dismiss alternate ideas through shutting down the rank-and-file members of the party that served on this now-defunct platform committee was like being witness to the final act of betrayal by people sworn to advance the interests of an entire party, not just the selfish interests of one female governor -- a governor who's not yet done using the party as her own campaign committee ... this time for the U.S. Senate.
Clearly, it is Linda Lingle's intention to maintain total control of her "party of one" while trying to be perceived as being above the fray. But Lingle's filthy fingerprints were all over this incident and her self-serving act of manipulating an important policymaking process will cause lasting if not permanent damage to our party, which I joined right out of high school. Astute observers know that Lingle has routinely put her political interests before anyone and anything else. But how many consecutive defeats at the ballot box by Republican candidates will it take for her most sycophantic political supporters to know when enough is enough; that the party exists to help all of its candidates to win rather than just its matriarch-du-jour?
In case I've not made my feelings clear, I feel that the co-opting of our party is disheartening and disgusting. We've been taken hostage, and before today we barely realized it because we were so excited to finally have a governor with an "R" after her name, even though the results have hardly been Republican. Now, however, that spell cast over many Republicans in Hawaii is broken. We are fully aware what's been going on, and we don't like it one bit.
So what's next for the reformers? Well, the sky's the limit now that Lingle leads a lame duck empire and since the line has now been clearly drawn in the sand by Darth Lingle and her stormtroopers. As volunteers with nothing but good intentions and sincere hope for what a well-run party can do to make our state a better place, we just have to work that much harder to fix a party that is completely broken, yet viciously defended by selfish individuals who have taken servitude and patronage to Lingle to extreme new depths of brown-nosing combined with depraved indifference and outright sabotage of the party's future. Mark my words, the battle for the soul of the Republican Party of Hawaii has just begun. We will prevail and we will work to ensure that the G.O.P. will soon be able to promote an agenda that is clearly different than the agenda and record of the Democrats, which have dominated Hawaii for the past 54 years. Even if Linda Lingle and her cronies don't want us to.
Eric Ryan, a Republican who lives in Ewa Beach, Hawaii, can be reached via email at mailto:ericryan@hawaii.rr.com
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