Since the days of George Ariyoshi running for governor, when the question “Who you going to call?” was asked, Rick Tsujimura was the Hawaii political ghostbuster who answered.
He helped run the campaigns of former Mayor Eileen Anderson when she first chased Frank Fasi out of City Hall and of Jeremy Harris when he wanted to be governor. Plus, the campaigns of Neil Abercrombie and Kirk Caldwell and also Arnold Morgado and Randy Iwase.
Before that, Tsujimura, a lawyer and lobbyist, was working in the campaigns of John Burns, Ariyoshi, John Craven and Ben Cayetano.
Mostly winners, a few losers and all Democrats. Tsujimura, the insider’s insider, remembered those campaigns in a new, interesting political book, “Campaign Hawaii,” published by Watermark Publishing.
His own campaign life started, Tsujimura recalled, with a moment of honesty by Hawaii’s best political recruiter, the founder of the modern Democratic Party, Jack Burns. Tsujimura’s parents took him to a “Burns for Governor” rally where they watched a political movie, which the young Tsujimura dubbed “political propaganda.”
When Burns came up to the 19-year-old, he said, “I hope you enjoyed that piece of propaganda.” The candor won over Tsujimura. He and Burns talked for a half-hour about the future of Americans of Japanese ancestry in Hawaii, Hawaii’s opportunity and chance to be a world model.
“It was an auspicious night, one that would alter the course of my life,” Tsujimura wrote.
It started with the early Hawaii Democratic Party rationale.
“We could all live together, that we could have an ideal society, unburdened by the strictures and norms of the Mainland. We could create a multiethnic society based on a person’s skills and intelligence and not on power and intrigue. It was a time of hope and aspirations, ideals and dreams,” Tsujimura wrote.
The 211-page book is not all political warm feelings. Tsujimura shares the infighting, such as when he was a deputy state attorney general and the state was constantly being sued by the Legal Aid Society. The state responded by going to the Legislature to cut the funding for Legal Aid.
“If someone needs money from the Legislature to attack you, cut the umbilical or at least threaten to do it. That was a lesson in raw politics — not nice, but making sausage never is,” Tsujimura wrote.
Also not always nice is the undercurrent of Hawaii politics that while one’s race or ethnicity should not drive an election, it sometimes comes close.
Tsujimura saw it played out in the campaigns of two mainland white candidates he supported, Jeremy Harris and Neil Abercrombie.
Even before that, it first came up while Tsujimura was discussing Ariyoshi’s hold on the Democratic Party, which in part was because Ariyoshi was Japanese-American. Ariyoshi’s political enemy was Frank Fasi. Tsujimura said their campaigns were almost identical, but “Ariyoshi’s was borne aloft by the memories of the AJA community and the legacy of Jack Burns. As long as those memories lingered, that voting block of AJA’s was immovable. … Ariyoshi was still an AJA and the Mainland-born Fasi was not. Not coming out and saying that it was a good thing but it was what it was,” Tsujimura wrote.
When looking at local politics, what some observers ignore or simplify is that the AJA political power is not just ethnic voting, but voting based on a shared experience of discrimination by a white-dominated plantation society.
When Harris didn’t run for governor in 2002, partly because of rumors of campaign finance investigations, Tsujimura wrote, that decision was “the worst thing that could happen to the local Democratic Party.”
“The efforts of the old guard to get Jeremy out, did far more political damage. In practical parlance it was, in effect, we don’t want non-locals, a theme that would permeate future elections.”
At the same time, Tsujimura noted that Hawaii elections operate with a strong sense of faith that campaigners have in their candidate, and how that expands a politician’s power.
Hawaii is a tiny state with a complex set of rules, and Tsujimura does a good job of explaining them.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.
