Speaking candidly, the second term of the Lingle administration is going to be four years of “lame duck” governance combined with a great deal of PR spin and, ultimately, preparation for Lingle’s intended move to D.C. Worse yet, there is no hope at all that anything of substance will be accomplished in 2007 or beyond – certainly not anything that matters to Republicans. But don’t start thinking this situation makes Linda Lingle sad. This lack of progress for the Republican Agenda is just what she and her supporters want.

You might have thought that all the time, money and energy spent by the Republican Party of Hawaii during the past few years by Lingle’s hand-picked team would yield big dividends at the upcoming session of the Legislature; and that the millions spent on political advertising in Hawaii in 2006 by Lingle and her political team would have paved the way for the Republican agenda to be taken seriously down at the Capitol in the Spring of 2007, and that Lingle would have invested her political popularity during her 1st term and during her campaigns into advancing the GOP’s prospects politically and with regard to policies. Hell no, cause it ain’t so.

It’s time for a little honesty. No amount of spin from party leaders or from Lingle herself can change the reality. Even with the largest margin of victory of any governor in Hawaii’s history, there is no Lingle mandate whatsoever from the voters for anything except for more of the same . . . which means nothing at all. Thanks to Lingle, who consistently refuses to campaign for anything resembling a Republican agenda, and thanks to the Hawaii GOP, which doesn’t even campaign on an agenda of specific reforms or proposals, there isn’t a snowflake’s chance in hell that the Democrat stranglehold on policy-making in Hawaii or on taxpayer throats has eased up even slightly. Moreover, the handful of Republican candidates which didn’t lose election campaigns in 2006 received no mandate of their own after Election Day 2006 to do anything except to continue being individually popular in their safe districts -- thereby making Lingle’s victory even more meaningless and hollow than it was.

Now reality is starting to hit home, and it’s not pretty. We’re not just in the minority as Republicans; we’re in a super-minority, which is music to the ears of Democrats and the status quo. Since 2000, there are now substantially fewer elected Republicans at the State Legislature. Lingle got herself elected for her first term in 2002, and the GOP lost seats at the Legislature. Midway during Lingle’s term in 2004, the GOP lost more seats at the Legislature. Then in 2006, Lingle got herself re-elected, and Republicans are even scarcer at the Capitol. In 6 years, we’ve gone from 19 in the State House to just eight.

In this environment, how much hope does a Republican agenda have? Isn’t the advancement our political and economic agenda what really matters?!? But how many Republican bills of substance do you think will ever pass? Being blunt, it’s now hopeless to expect anything but rejection when votes are cast in committee or on the floor. The tiny handful of elected Republicans, many of whom only get by with name recognition, cannot be expected to wake up each morning brimming with confidence that they can change Hawaii, even with a Republican governor. Drastically outnumbered by Democrats, they don’t even have the votes to change the wallpaper, let alone the votes to implement a Republican agenda. So, when Lingle blusters on about “bipartisanship” and “cooperation”, she’s really talking about rubber-stamping the Democrat agenda and sharing the credit with Democrats in her attempt to stay popular, rather than advancing anything that matters to Republicans. I suppose that ‘cooperation’ is a good thing if you really like the current state of affairs. But if you want real change, then you start to wonder so what if Lingle was overwhelming re-elected? After all, she doesn’t pursue or even support the changes that Republicans want for Hawaii.

What follows is a serious list of all the reforms you can forget about, thanks directly to the mismanagement and malfeasance at the Hawaii Republican Party and Lingle’s opportunistic view of public service. So if you’re keeping score, here’s what’s not going to happen for the foreseeable future:

• Meaningful Education Reform . . . forget it, not with Democrats in charge
• Preventing Tax Increases while Cutting Existing Taxes and the Size of Government. . . ditto
• Exempting Food and Medicine from the General Excise Tax . . . ditto again
• Toughening Anti-Crime Laws and Improving Enforcement . . . ditto
• Preventing and Eliminating Wasteful Spending . . . ditto
• Reforming Workers Compensation . . . ditto
• Saving money by Consolidating Services and Agencies Duplicated by both City and State governments . . . ditto yet again
• Land Use Reform to reduce the cost of residential and commercial real estate . . . ditto
• Making Hawaii more “business friendly” . . . ditto
• Celebrating Hawaii’s Statehood (like we used to in the good old days) . . . ditto
• Blocking stupid Democrat ideas . . . forget about it, Lingle’s veto was overridden by Democrats in the Legislature nearly 20 times in the past 2 years alone, and she agrees with Democrats even more often.

To be objective when judging Lingle and party leaders, remember that actions matter more than words. Here’s a prime example. After the Legislative session ended badly for Lingle and Republicans in May 2004, Lingle told reporters that she “would attempt to hold Democrats responsible for the demise of her legislative agenda.” Well, I guess she forgot to do that in the campaign of 2004 and then again in the campaign of 2006 by simply forgetting to promote a reform agenda, and the troubling electoral results speak for themselves. Perhaps, rather than forgetting to hold Democrats responsible, it’s becoming abundantly clear that all that matters to Lingle is her popularity, so she can get to Washington, D.C., where it will be easy to hang on like Inouye and Akaka until -- like our current U.S. senators -- ‘natural causes’ create a vacancy.

The Hawaii GOP is the one organization which people like me are supposed to be able to depend on to effectively lead the fight for change, to lead the year-round public education efforts to spread the word about what we stand for and why, to make steady inroads in districts considered “safe” for Democrats, to pursue electoral victory for our candidates, to push for policy changes which reflect the ideals that define Republicans.

However, when the party is hijacked and commandeered by Lingle and her cult following to become a “party of one”, and when that person and her cultists don’t even want to pursue a Republican agenda, then you can kiss that GOP agenda (outlined above) goodbye for a long, long time, with no chance of being adopted.

Now that Lingle has successfully gutted the GOP as a vehicle to promote reform and prepares to embark on a life in Washington, it’s no accident that she’ll be leaving behind an even weaker Hawaii Republican Party than the one she took over back in 1998. Most analysts predict that Lingle will be barely remembered as having any impact on public policy from a state and local perspective. And soon she’ll be casting yes or no votes on the floor of the U.S. Senate, which deals with national issues that have nothing to do with advancing progress on the issues I’ve listed above.

So when you strip away the PR bluster which surrounds the Lingle administration, really very little has been accomplished or will be accomplished which matters to Republicans. And when you ask reform-minded Republicans about Lingle, they’ll probably tell you that she’s spent a bit too much time and effort supporting Democrat initiatives like the record Rail Tax about to be imposed January 1, 2006, and the Akaka Bill.

Lingle’s personal political success comes with a heavy price tag, which is the permanent state of inaction regarding the agenda items that matter most to Republicans. It’s long past time to break the magic spell that was cast by Sorceress Lingle over Hawaii’s Republicans, who were desperate for any kind of political success. She and her devoted cultist lackeys want us to keep thinking that it’s OK for other Republicans to keep losing in other races as long as she keeps winning.

Moreover, Team Lingle wants us to stop highlighting differences between Republicans and Democrats so she can stay popular. And they want us to stay under this spell until Lingle, and her handmaiden Duke Aiona, have jumped to the next rung on the ladder.

The whole situation begs the question: Will Party members wake up from the mass hypnosis in time to see the light? Will they take back their Party and work to create a real mandate for change, or will they continue to forfeit dreams of reform and carry on accepting Lingle’s individual popularity and electoral success as a worthwhile goal in and of itself? The answer lies in how these party members react to the following assertion: For fake Republicans, getting Lingle elected is all that matters.

But for "real" Republicans in Hawaii, achieving real, measurable reform is all that really matters. How a person responds to these words will determine exactly how long the Republican Agenda remains dead-on-arrival.

If you ask for my opinion, only the results matter. Everything else is just fluff, gossip, spin, games and four more years of inaction. And these, my friends, are the steep costs of Lingle’s selfishness and of the Hawaii GOP’s incompetence.

Eric Ryan is a Republican who lives in Ewa Beach. He can be reached via email at mailto:eric@studioryan.net

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