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Chapter 14 Democratic Reinventions: Status Quo and Change Having won the three-way Democratic primary of 1974 with only 36 percent of the vote, George Ariyoshi was in a politically insecure position during his first four years in office. The nature of his insecurity was punctuated on the night of his election victory, when Tom Gill gave up his eight-year quest for the governorship, leaving to Fasi the potential for getting a majority vote in the next Democratic primary. The scale of Frank Fasi’s ambitions was illustrated to me as a political reporter in 1968, when it was becoming apparent that he finally would be mayor of Honolulu. In his campaign office, facing his desk, a five-step projection of his imagined future was written on a board: Step one was mayor of Honolulu. Step two was governor of Hawai‘i; step three, United States senator; step four, vice president; and step five, president of the United States. As he evolved in his role of Mister Mayor, he developed a somewhat more lighthearted presentation of himself. He might be a feisty fellow, but he was looking out for the little guy. He might be a rambunctious player, but it was all in a good cause. When he held his voice in check, he was a good impromptu speaker. When he succeeded in suppressing his seething temper, he was good in the give and take of a press conference. Long after the fact, many of his opponents would concede that he created a record of accomplishment as mayor.1 He was a demanding, businesslike administrator who lived by the idea that to get results for the public was to get their vote. He accumulated lists of what he had done: fountains, free summer fun, paving and planting the City Hall parking lot, and above all the city’s increasingly efficient bus system, logo typed TheBus. If people forgot about TheBus, they remembered it when they saw Fasi in his van, which 322 was TheMayor’sBus. In contrast to the politics of ethnic healing, metaphysics, and negotiating Hawai‘i’s relationship with the world that were so much a part of the mainstream Democratic Party, Fasi focused simply on delivering the goods and reminding people at election time. Lots of energy went into feuds—with the City Council, the daily newspapers , the governor, and the legislature—in a way that completely contradicted the spirit of consensus. A feud orchestrated by Fasi was political theater that played effectively to the needs or grievances of sizable audiences . For example, the City Council had a history of zoning variances and ethical violations; the daily newspapers, through a joint operating agreement , had become a virtual monopoly; and it was indeed true that the governor had too much power. Some people who knew him liked him and clung to him over a lifetime , such as the nisei war veteran Iwao Yokooji. More typically, to know him was to distrust something in him—the intoxication with power, the breezy manipulation of information, the intensity of his hatreds, or his selffulfilling prophesy that the world was against him. The political scientist Dan Tuttle had managed Fasi’s first campaigns, sacrificing himself to Fasi’s advancement, only to be alienated by Fasi’s indiscriminate anger. Walter Heen had been driven into Jack Burns’ arms by Fasi. Tom Gill had supported Fasi in 1968, only to learn he had played with fire. Editors and reporters loathed Fasi. Although Ariyoshi’s compulsion was to get along with everyone, he privately fumed when he talked about Fasi. After becoming mayor, Fasi was never literally alone, because he had patronage, but he was always alone in more elemental ways. Relatively few who actually knew him spoke up for him vigorously, even those who owed their jobs to him. He was the antithesis of the prevailing political culture of Hawai‘i, in which people got to know each other and made judgments based on firsthand impressions—a culture that made Honolulu the world’s largest small town, or in the words of author Richard Pratt, “an international city with small-town characteristics.”2 Fasi often said he represented “the little man.” The little man was out there, disconnected, unreachable by ordinary means, but nonetheless the little man was what Fasi knew about. The little man was a political force of widely dispersed people who shared Fasi as their political common denominator . For nearly half a century, a seemingly irreducible minimum of onethird of...

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