Fallen Flower
Colleen Hanabusa (The One Party; 1951-2026)
A major Hawaii politician died today.
What can we learn from her life - and the comments on her Honolulu Pravda hagiography obituary?
The most important thing to know about Colleen Hanabusa (< hana ‘flower’ + busa ‘cluster’) is that she belonged to The One Party, the party that has dominated Hawaii politics since the Great Reversal of 1954,
the territorial elections of 1954 in which the long dominance of the Hawaii Republican Party in the legislature came to an abrupt end, replaced by the Democratic Party of Hawaii which has remained dominant since.
Hanabusa was born right before the Reversal:
Hanabusa was born May 4, 1951, and raised in [rural] Waianae where her great-grandparents worked on a [White-owned] sugar plantation and her family later established a service station, Hanabusa Service, in 1948.
The White-dominated Hawaii that her grandparents had emigrated to was about to collapse. Hanabusa would have had no memories of that (ahem) dark time.
She came of age amidst a tide of rising brown power, when a ‘good’ e-duh-cation was no longer a White privilege:
After graduating from [second-tier private school1] St. Andrew’s Priory in 1969, Hanabusa earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology and economics from the University of Hawaii in 1973, and followed it with a master’s degree in sociology in 1975 and then a law degree in 1977 also from UH.
A law duh-gree often seems like a prerequisite for power in Hawaii and the USSA as a whole.
Brave’s AI doesn’t know how many Hawaii politicians are lawyers, but it did provide these national figures which are lower than I expected:
So Gov. Dr. Josh “Body Bags” Green, MDeeee (not JDeeee2!) wasn’t the major exception to the rule that I thought he was.
How Green rose to power from arrival in 2000 to governor in 2022 is unclear to me.
Hanabusa’s ascent seems clearer. Looks like she used her degree to make connections:
As a labor lawyer during the 1980s and early 1990s under her married name at the time, Colleen Sakurai, Hanabusa represented some high-profile clients who were politically powerful and others who were politicians or intersected with politics.
Working for those clients, she might have begun to wonder, Why can’t I have people work for me? Why can’t I have some of that luscious power?
In 1998, Hanabusa sought political office herself. She ran for a state Senate seat against Sen. James Aki, the Democratic incumbent who a year earlier had been granted deferred acceptance of a no-contest plea to two felony gambling charges.
Ah, Aki - I faintly recall that law-breaking lawmaker.
Of course, Hanabusa ran against him as a Democrat. The Democratic primaries are where the real action usually is in Hawaii. The Other Party that once ruled Hawaii is a faint shadow of its former self.
She won and in 2001 “caught some heat” when
she spearheaded efforts to reform state civil service laws, an action that stirred up politically powerful public worker unions.
“While the effort won quick public praise, it immediately drew the opposition of public employee unions, and Hanabusa, although being a labor lawyer, was never a favorite daughter of the public unions,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter and political columnist Richard Borreca wrote in a column a few years later.
I wonder what her motives for reform were.
Shortly afterward, she introduced legislation
to provide Jeff Stone, developer of Ko Olina Resort & Marina, with $75 million in state tax credits to build a “world class” aquarium to enhance the resort.
[…]
A year later, Hanabusa drew flack after it became publicly known that the home she shared at Ko Olina with her fiancee at the time, state Sheriff John F. Souza III, was sold to Souza by Stone, and that Souza also rented an office from Stone that Hanabusa rented from Souza for her law practice. Souza, a friend of Stone’s, had a trucking company that helped build homes at the resort.
Hanabusa, Souza and Stone said at the time that the real estate deals were at market prices and unrelated to the tax-credit legislation. Hanabusa shortly thereafter married Souza. Later, the aquarium project fizzled.
Was the aquarium ever intended to exist, or was it just an excuse for tax credits?
As we say here, watevaz (whatevers). Conflict of interest, you say? That’s Wacist. It’s not part of our kawcha (culture).
Our highest value is karap (corrupt). You just don’t understand …
Hanabusa sought “higher power”:
While serving in the Legislature, Hanabusa pursued ambitions for higher office that resulted in two unsuccessful runs for Congress that didn’t put at risk her position in the state Senate.
[…]
The primary election [for her second run] drew nine Democratic competitors.
See what I mean about Democratic primaries being where the action is?
She lost, but
[a]s an unrelated sort of consolation prize, Hanabusa was named Senate president in 2007 and became the first woman to lead the Senate or House of Representatives in Hawaii’s Legislature.
Hanabusa had angled for the Senate’s top position for several years, and succeeded despite early negative feedback.
Local historian Bob Dye wrote in a 2001 Honolulu Advertiser column that Hanabusa was told her goal was unattainable in part because she was a freshman at the time but also because she was a woman and had a “take no prisoners” political style.
Hawaii is deep blue but isn’t feminist. By the time Hanabusa was in office, brown power was the norm - but most of that power was held by men, and women were expected to not take prisoners.
U GO GRRRRL! Probably with a little help from the One-Armed God, the patriarch of Hawaii politics:
When Hawaii’s revered U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye [The One Party] died in late 2012 at age 88, Hanabusa as his political protege saw a good opportunity to fill the seat, especially because Inouye before death conveyed his “last wish” for her to succeed him.
Abercrombie [The One Party], however, as governor would pick Inouye’s interim successor, and named his lieutenant governor at the time, Brian Schatz [The One Party], to fill out the last two years of Inouye’s term.
Michigan-born Schatz is part of the Jewish wave of recent Hawaii politics, as is New York-born, Pennsylvania-raised Gov. Dr. Green.
Hanabusa is part of the older Japanese wave. The two waves clashed:
Two years later, Hanabusa did not seek re-election to her House seat and instead challenged Schatz for his Senate seat, in what became an intense and bruising showdown.
Some Schatz supporters and Hanabusa critics made a case that Schatz, then 41, was positioned to establish longer-term seniority in Congress compared with Hanabusa, then 63.
Hanabusa discounted the notion, telling the Washington Post, “It’s almost like saying that somebody would be anointed for 40 years.”
Winning in Hawaii politics can mean having that position for life. Schatz could still be ‘our’ senator for the next forty years.
Schatz won the 2014 primary election by a narrow margin,
How did Schatz, a member of a group almost no one here belongs to, beat Hanabusa, a member of the second largest ethnic group3, in a state where voting is a tribal contest? I don’t know. I’m suspicious. Perhaps he was perceived as a White savior.4 Anti-White attitudes coexist alongside a belief that we need outsiders to save us from ourselves. In Hawaii, the Feds are regarded as the ‘good guys’.
and Hanabusa returned to Honolulu to practice law.
If only that were all that she did ...
Honolulu’s mayor at the time, Kirk Caldwell, quickly appointed Hanabusa to the board of directors of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation [HART] overseeing the city’s overdue and over-budget rail project.
The train to nowhere is still overdue and overbudget.
Hanabusa was HART’s board chair until 2016 when she returned to Capitol Hill after easily winning an election to succeed then-U.S. Rep. Mark Takai, who decided not to seek re-election due to cancer that led to his death soon after.
Japanese replacing Japanese … as Inouye had intended before he had died four years earlier.
Just a year later, in 2017, Hanabusa declared that she wouldn’t seek re-election to the U.S. House so that she could to run for governor in a bid to prevent then-Gov. [Okinawan] David Ige from being elected in 2018 to a second four-year term.
During a televised debate, Hanabusa criticized Ige for his handling of a January 2018 false missile alert from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, calling the incident that generated widespread public panic “a systemic failure of leadership” by Ige’s administration.
“You had no plan to begin with, and you didn’t know when something went wrong,” Hanabusa said. “Will you finally take personal responsibility for the missile fiasco?”
Ige won the primary contest, and Hanabusa finished out her congressional term in January 2019.
Was being a woman a factor against her as late as 2018?5 Sex could have been the tiebreaker in a race between a Japanese female (Hanabusa) and a Japanese-adjacent Okinawan male (Ige). Voters here are interested in identity, not ideology.
Ige locked down Hawaii in 2020. I have no doubt Hanabusa would have done the same had she won.
That year, Hanabusa tried to get the next best throne in Hawaii. To be mayor of Honolulu is to rule an entire island with about 70% of the state’s population.6
Out of office once again, Hanabusa mounted a campaign in 2020 to succeed term-limited Caldwell [a.k.a. Maskless Mayor I7] as mayor amid a crowded nonpartisan field of 15 candidates who included former Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann, then-City Council member Kym Pine, former state high school athletics chief Keith Amemiya and former local television station general manager Rick Blangiardi.
Hanabusa finished third in the primary behind Amemiya and Blangiardi, who won the general election
and became Maskless Mayor II, continuing the CONvid madness.
Blangiardi in 2021 reappointed Hanabusa to HART’s board.
Exactly what that board did beside waste billions of Americans’ money is a mystery to me. I wrote “Americans” because our train to nowhere was funded by taxpayers from Alaska to Maine to Florida to California. We couldn’t pay for it all ourselves. We’re going to pay for it for years to come, long after Hanabusa is gone.
Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi, who appointed Hanabusa to the HART chair, said in a statement, “Hawaii has lost a remarkable leader, and we all have lost a friend.”
I can’t stand the loose usage of the word “friend”.
Maskless Mayor II continued,
Managing Director Mike Formby and I had a close relationship with Colleen, and she dedicated her life to serving the people of Hawaii with intelligence, determination, and an unwavering sense of purpose.
AI could have written that - or any of the other reactions to Hanabusa’s passing in the article or the comments.
I roll my eyes at how the commenters who complained about Hanabusa’s train to nowhere now put her on a pedestal and bow before her. They say they want more politicians like her. No worries. They’ll get them. They’ll never stop voting for The One Letter. This is our unofficial anthem:
They are the blue version of the orange guys who moan about Israel this, Jews that, while supporting ‘their’ Zionist president.
They are loyal.8
One flower has fallen, but a garden of blue flowers remains.
“Second-tier” does not equal ‘bad’. Hawaii has a pyramidial hierarchy of schools with Punahou, ʻIolani, Kamehameha, and possibly also Mid-Pacific Institute - all private - at the apex. St. Andrew’s is under them:
Raised in the Anglican faith, Queen Emma [of Hawaii] recognized the educational needs of the young women of Hawaiʻi and founded St. Andrew’s Priory so that Hawaiian girls would receive an education equivalent to what was traditionally offered only to boys. Her mission of establishing a girls’ school in Honolulu took her to England to seek the counsel of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Under his authority, the Sisters of the Church of England returned to Hawaiʻi with Queen Emma to begin their work.
The school opened on Ascension Day, May 30, 1867, under the direction of Queen Emma and Mother Priscilla Lydia Sellon of the Society of the Most Holy Trinity of Devonport, Plymouth, England.
The school is the fruit of the Anglophilia that doomed the Hawaiian monarchy - and that is still visible in the Hawaiian flag today:
The use of the Union Jack is a legacy of the British Royal Navy's historical relations with the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and, in particular, the pro-British sentiment of its first ruler, King Kamehameha I. The kingdom was never formally part of the British Empire. The flag design was retained after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, after U.S. annexation in 1898, and after statehood in 1959.
The fact that Hanabusa attended St. Andrew’s in downtown Honolulu, far from rural Waianae, in the 1960s indicates that her parents had high ambitions for her. It is common for unambitious students in Hawaii to go to private schools now, but I don’t think that was the case sixty years ago.
JD = Juris Doctor ‘doctor of law’ as opposed to MD = Medicinae Doctor ‘doctor of medicine’.
Filipinos are Hawaii’s largest ethnic group, but their influence does not reflect their numbers. As the Philippines is a multiethnic country, breaking down the Filipino category by ethnicity might result in the Japanese taking first place.
Jews are considered Haole (White) in Hawaii.
One could cite the fact that we had a female governor for eight years as evidence that our electorate was no longer sexist. In 2006, Missouri-born Jewish Linda Lingle
won by the largest margin in state history, 63 percent to 35 percent
against Japanese Randy Iwase.
Hanabusa did not run against Lingle that year. She might have guessed that she would have ended up like Japanese Mazie Hirono who lost to Lingle in 2002. I suspect Hirono and Iwase got a lot of the Japanese vote while failing to attract sufficient non-Japanese voters.
The City and County of Honolulu encompasses the entire island of Oʻahu.
We all had to wear muzzles during CONvid, but Mayor Caldwell didn’t.
He was special. Protected by the Aura of Leadership. His poor sign language interpreter, however, wasn’t. Did that man survive?
To be fair, some of the MAGAs I know are finally beginning to seriously question their orange idol. But I expect them to cling to ♥ANCE.
They might reject one hero, but they still need another. They still aren’t asoteric.
They’re still ahead of Hawaii voters who can’t even get to the rejection phase. Our people will forever be mystified by why bad things happen when they keep voting for The One Party. Causation is Wacist.