A “B” doesn’t resound.
To resound means to be resonant; to produce a loud, sonorous note that lasts and lasts. It means very definite, emphatic, unequivocal — the tremendous echo of a cannon in a valley.
A grade of “B” lands with a noise somewhere between the thud of a stack of papers being dumped onto a desk and the tepid applause of a weary audience glad the show is finally over.
When Gov. David Ige said that, were he to give grades, the 2016 Legislative session would earn a “resounding B,” maybe he heard something that the rest of us didn’t. Those outside the echo chamber of the Capitol can only judge our legislators’ success by what we see and hear in our daily lives.
So does that B make Ige an easy grader, or was it an acknowledgment of the difficulty of the session syllabus? It’s hard to get an A in four months of work trying to fix Hawaii’s major ills. By using the word “resounding,” Ige was signaling that solid work had been done, but everyone knows a B means “did OK work and didn’t get in trouble, but a whole step away from excellence.”
Ige even used the classic teacher-comment every student hates to read on their report card:
“… there is always room for improvement.”
Indeed.
But Ige isn’t the one grading the Legislature anyhow. It’s voters who get to say whether any meaningful work was accomplished during the session, work that will solve the significant problems facing the state of Hawaii.
There’s been a spate of rosy peer evals and self-evals lately. Legislators praised their collective work last week, saying that they had done a good job and had a very productive session. Mayor Kirk Caldwell is giving himself high marks for his performance as mayor in his campaign ads for re-election.
Well, of course everybody thinks they’re doing a good job.
It’s like when teachers hand out self-evaluations to students, most of the papers come back with glowing reports from the students about themselves. Even the ones who know they farted around all semester write convincing paragraphs about how they managed to come to class despite almost insurmountable odds, stayed cheerful and turned in an assignment or two and therefore deserve an A. If grades were self-administered, there would be no curve.
All members of the state House and 13 members of the state Senate are up for re-election this year.
In November, when voters hand in the only report cards that matter, the grades will be based not on what legislators said they did, but on tangible evidence. If the homeless population is just as large and visible, if the schools are just as hot and miserable, it doesn’t matter what anybody said they did, just that it didn’t get done yet.
When dealing with the deeply flawed machine of democracy that is our Legislature, maybe an A is beyond reach. But it shouldn’t be beyond aspiration.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
