Senate Showdown
They may both be Democrats, but as a member of MidWeek’s editorial board commented after Sen. Dan Akaka and his challenger, Congressman Ed Case, visited our office for interviews, they’re ‘like night and day’
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Case: opposed to
drilling
degree of sovereignty. On July 8, the Senate voted 56-41 to close debate and bring the bill up for a vote. Sixty votes were needed for cloture, and the future of the bill is in doubt.
“The cloture bill was not a failure,” Akaka insists. “We lost by four votes. Two of my votes weren’t there, and the night before the vote a letter was sent by the Department of Justice saying the Bush administration was opposed to the bill as unconstitutional. If we’d had an up and down vote, we would have won. No question. We’ll bring it up next year.”
Akaka: pro-ANWAR
Case co-sponsored the Akaka Bill on the House side. “It would give Hawaiians the same relationship with the United States government that other indigenous people have throughout the country,” he says. “We should all be concerned by the defeat of federal recognition. And make no mistake, it was a defeat for the Akaka Bill.”
Honolulu rail
Akaka and Case may disagree on the importance of that cloture vote, but they are in total agreement on the need for a mass transit system on Oahu. “Rail is the best answer,” says Akaka. “How else do we do it? Yet more traffic lanes? By boat? I wish we’d done it a dozen years ago at half the price it will cost today.”
Says Case: “I don’t see a reasonable alternative to it (rail). People in Leeward Oahu are living in a form of hell because government didn’t act on a perfectly foreseeable development. In 1990 we rejected the train and said we could solve the problem with increased bus capacity. It hasn’t worked. We can’t get 100 percent consensus on a mass transit system, but we can’t allow a vocal minority to negate the fragile consensus we have achieved. So let’s go already.”
Taxes
Case and Akaka both recognize the problems besetting the nation’s middle class - so frequently referred to as the disappearing middle class.
“I believe in a progressive tax system,” says Case. “Right now the extreme upper income levels are disproportionately favored in our tax system - the upper three percent. I voted for alternative minimum tax relief, and Sen. Akaka didn’t. Of course we have to provide tax relief in a budget neutral way.”
Akaka, the former school-teacher, bemoans Republican tax policy for what it has done to education. “So many good programs have been cut by this administration,” says Akaka, “programs that will affect the middle class. I’m the ranking member of the federal work force committee, and I’ve seen projections that show that we’re in real trouble. We’ll soon be facing classrooms without teachers.
“The United States produced 130,000 engineers last year; the Chinese 300,000; and the Japanese 400,000. We must bolster programs that attract and retain good jobs. But the Republicans offer lower taxes to the wealthy instead.”
Prescription drug prices
Both candidates express concern about high drug prices. “The culture of Washington needs to change,” says Case. “Insider lobbying controls too much legislation. Right now the drug companies have a lock on Washington.
“I favor the reimportation of drugs. We’re subsidizing the research and development, then selling them overseas. I also favor bulk purchasing of drugs. Any business bulk purchases, but our current law doesn’t allow the United States government to do that for Medicare patients. We have to buy them at retail. That’s criminal.”
Akaka says simply that he’s concerned about the purchase of “foreign drugs. They must be good drugs. We need more money for prescription drug programs.”
ANWAR oil drilling
Case has criticized Akaka for his support of legislation to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil exploration. “It’s a refuge,” says Case. “A national - an international - resource.”
“This was a tough vote for me because the whole Democratic caucus was against drilling,” says Akaka. “But I listened to the local people who have been there for hundreds of years. They have no school, no plumbing - they’re still using honey buckets. They need a better quality of life. Look what the oil pipeline did for Pt. Barrow: paved roads, a modern school. So I voted for the indigenous people, otherwise I’m an environmentalist.”
Says Case: “I don’t accept the senator’s explanation on drilling.”
FEMA and Hawaii
Case does accept and endorse Akaka’s opinion that the Federal Emergency Management Administration “treated Hawaii well” after Hurricane Iniki devastated Kauai. But both candidates agree that FEMA’s post-Katrina performance has been poor.
Case lays the blame on Congress. “Congress has to do a better job as an equal branch of government,” he says. “The initial problem was that FEMA had the wrong leadership. Big money was appropriated by Congress to help Katrina victims, but there’s been no oversight. The system in Washington is to support mega-contributors to congressional campaigns.”
Akaka sees an administrative problem: the absorption of FEMA by the new Department of Homeland Security. “FEMA was in disarray. Its director answered to an under secretary of Homeland Security. A lot of FEMA positions were vacant because Homeland Security took money from FEMA. FEMA should be independent of Homeland Security and answer directly to the president. Homeland Security’s focus is on terrorism, not natural disasters.”
War on terror
The war on terror, like the war in Iraq, divides Akaka and Case. Akaka, for example, voted “for the first Patriot Act and against the second. It didn’t have enough limitations on the executive, and the Bush administration had abused it. I was concerned about its impact on civil rights of our citizens.”
Case wasn’t in Congress when the initial Patriot Act was passed, but he voted for the second, arguing that needed safeguards to civil rights had been added. “Terrorism is for real,” says Case. “It’s not an anomaly. We had the Lockerby bombing, the attack on the USS Cole - before 9/11. We must deal with terrorism directly and firmly. We must defend ourselves. We can’t take a chance. Where we find it, we have to remove it.”
Clear choices
The debate will go on, but not in the dozen or more locations across the state, as Case has proposed. Akaka and Case met Aug. 31 in an AARP-sponsored forum televised on PBS-Hawaii. Case looked 53, energetic and ready to wrestle with the other 99 in the U.S. Senate; Akaka looked 81 and had trouble finding his place in his notes. Television can be brutal, and Akaka and his people made clear even before the PBS meeting that there would be only one debate.
Democrats have a real choice in the Akaka-Case election. The two candidates are very different men. Or as one member of MidWeek‘s editorial board said after the second interview, “like night and day.”
Personally speaking
Akaka was the youngest of eight children of a working-class Hawaiian-Chinese family. His father worked as a molder for the Honolulu Iron Works, helping to build equipment for Hawaii’s sugar plantations. The family lived in Pauoa Valley, and Danny Akaka attended the Kamehameha Schools.
Akaka says in his website profile, “We didn’t have much, but we were raised in a very spiritual manner with a great love of family, which our parents passed on to us. Looking back, I am amazed at how they were able to give us so much of the things that really mattered when they had so little.” The spirituality particularly touched Danny’s brother Abe; he became the kahu at Kawaihao Church - where brother Dan served as choir director for 17 years.
Case was a child of comparative privilege. His father practiced law with the Hilo firm of Carlsmith and Carlsmith. Ed Case attended Hilo public schools until the seventh grade when he became a boarder at the exclusive Hawaii Preparatory Academy in Waimea. “HPA was unique,” Case says. “The atmosphere bred self-sufficiency and independence. Waimea was a cowboy town that happened to have a private school.”
After graduation from
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