I
posted earlier that Rep. Neil Abercrombie was considering a run for Hawaii governor's office against Republican incumbent Linda Lingle, but he has decided to stay put and run for re-election to the House instead.
Abercrombie's remarks are provided by the Hawaii Reporter (a conservative blog, er, online news outlet or something).
From Honolulu's dailies, Advertiser has this story and the Star-Bulletin also reports.
Hawaii political blogger Doug White at Poinography.com comments particularly on the sad situation for the chair of the HI Dems.
Big Island Mayor Harry Kim still has yet to make a decision regarding a run for Gov. More info on him in an earlier diary.
Yesterday, the
Advertiser had this
piece asking if Lingle is too popular to beat, and White also
reviews that article:
Lingle has triangulated herself into a safe re-election position. She has kept the right flank of her party in the cold and quiet, she has not taken a stand or ordered anything that made the public universally upset, she chose her vetoes wisely, and her biggest legislative ideas were killed by the legislature. She has provided relatively little for the Democrats to point to as evidence that she has failed, much less done anything to make it easy for Democrats to argue they would have handled things markedly better. On top of all that, the economy is buzzing, so the business community is content. Her record is the equivalent of boring vanilla, but maybe that's good enough for most folks.
The Democrats may (as DePledge and Rep. Schatz argue) be dealing with a generational gap and a failure to groom a candidate for governor, but I think an equally strong explanation is that we are seeing the inevitable result of too-expensive campaigns and Bush-style image management. The high costs of campaigning, and the corresponding huge re-election fund Lingle is amassing, have driven centrism to its apotheosis. Her studiously wishy-washy policy and strict message discipline minimizes (but does not eliminate, e.g. Rep. Harbin) the chance of any embarrassments. Voters (and, to be frank, donors) that really are centrists don't see any compelling reason to abandon Lingle, and anyone attacking her from the left (or the right) would run into a money-raising problem very quickly if they try to mine the skinny ends of the political bell curve.