08-02-2018, 03:58 AM
@randomq: Here's how it seems to work. The public employees' (and other) unions vote in blocks which control the Democratic Primary, assuring that only their candidates get nominated. The broader electorate is trained to vote Democratic, so it's all decided by the unions in the primary. They don't want people who actually think to be in office because it might threaten their perks and control. The Linda Lingle episode was an anomaly in which the "damage" was controlled by an entrenched, impossible to fire bureaucracy along with a legislature full of tools. Also, many of the union control measures are actually written into the state constitution. We can't win. And, as I've stated many times before, I'm not a Republican, just somebody sick of the status quo in Hawaii politics.