You think I'm kidding?
It's a caucus. It's his home state. Done deal, right?
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Somebody actually bothered to do some actual journalism about Hawaii's political situation.
And the news is really damn scary for Obama.
"Hello? What's this about the politics?" I asked him about the candidates. He supports Hillary because she has more experience, and explains that Obama's been doing a good job raising money in Hawaii--especially among "haoles" (pron. "howlies," a common Hawaiian pejorative for white people) who he says have been flocking to Hawaii's still-booming real-estate market (note: an unverified assertion).
Furthermore, he says, Hawaii's Democratic Party has been controlled by the Japanese since the 1960s, and influential Japanese-American Senator Daniel Inouye is making a high-profile trip from Washington, D.C to stump for Hillary. This is big news.
Dan Iouye is the Democratic party out there, and it is an old-school machine like you'd find in Chicago or New York.
My follow-up call to a local expert, Ira Rohter from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, reveals that the Democratic establishment is aggressively working to inoculate the state against Obama--priming their warhorses, the two biggest government unions, for a major turnout effort and bringing professional organizers from the mainland.
During the 2004 primaries, Dennis Kucinich apparently caught them by surprise, coming in second place with the help of left-wing progressive organizers. Now warned, they've vowed to prevent a repeat performance by Obama. They're betting their manpower advantage will overcome Obama's effort to turn out young Hawaiians, who are legendarily apathetic about voting. Professor Rohter speculates that Hillary thinks she at has at least a chance to embarrass Obama by beating him in his home state. He says Obama, who is in Seattle today, may have to consider flying to Hawaii and making a dramatic appearance to galvanize support.
It's not a lost cause, of course, but it's an uphill climb for him here:
This isn't to say that Obama is just relying on young people. He's also trying to piggyback on the Kucinich progressives and mobilizing his former alumni network at Punahou--the elite private school he attended in his teens. In Hawaii, elite schools like Punahou and the Kamehameha schools provide instant connections to powerful families, giving their alumni an automatic leg up if they want to enter politics. And, as always, Obama's campaign has focused on community organization in a way that Hillary's doesn't even attempt to do. "They're doing all the right things," Rohter, a campaign-organization junkie, tells me.
So, a very tough, determined party machine is trying to squash the efforts of progressive activists. And very well may succeed.
Not only that, but in Wisconsin Obama is clinging to tiny, statistically insignificant leads in recent polling.
What can you do?
We need 110,000 calls to go out this weekend.
That's enough for all of you.
Note: If you wind up calling people in Hawaii, here's the link for looking up caucus locations.