 Roundtable. We're here on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday where we talk about politics and environmental issues. I'm Senator Russell Ruderman from the Pune district and Kauru district on the Big Island of Hawaii, your host. And my guest today is Neil Milner. Thank you for joining us. Oh, you're welcome. Neil Milner is a former political science professor at the University of Hawaii where he taught for 40 years. And he's currently a columnist for Honolulu Civil Beat, a political analyst for KITV, and a regular contributor to Hawaii Public Radio's The Conversation. His most recent book is The Gift of Underpants. Thank you for joining us, Neil. So over the last 40 years, you've been involved in politics. Of course, you're one of our foremost political observers and commentators to my knowledge. How do you think government transparency in Hawaii has gotten better, gotten worse over this period of time, in your opinion? Well, it's gotten better in one way that's very much involved with technology. There's much more information if you go to the legislature's website and there's all kinds of information about bills and laws and how to do that. And Hawaii does a pretty good job overall on its government websites where I think it's still not very transparent or in the kind of traditional political ways that you always worry about transparency. One, I think, is the state bureaucracies. It's still like pulling teeth to try to get the documentation and the information that you need. It's not a very user-friendly or client-friendly kind of atmosphere, I think, in a lot of state agencies. The second thing is that the way the legislature works, the kind of time pressures and so on, means that often the closer you get to the final decisions, the less input and the rest of us know what's going on. And so the climax is these late-night meetings where stuff gets tossed around. And I know the rules have changed over the years to limit a little bit how much you can get away with. But I think those, and those are very fundamental transparency issues, and they're not the kinds of things that can be overcome by technology. It gives you other kinds of information that's important. So things like, as it gets towards the end of the session, like, for example, conference committee, is that an example of what you're talking about? Sure. And I think that that's, I understand the reasons for that, but if you're asking me, does the public know what goes on? And so there's a lot of coverage of the legislature at the last minute that's based sort of on speculation. You know what the bill is that's going into the legislature, into the final analysis or the conference meetings or whatever, but you don't get much information about the process. And I think that there still is, as there is in American politics generally, there's an inequality of access that's not based necessarily on self-conscious favoritism, but people who have influence, who have a kind of sense of influencing the political process tend to be able to know whom to call to find out things, to find stuff out. And there's nothing preventing anybody from doing that, but we know that that's not done very often. People who are better educated, people who have participated in politics in some ways from voting to working in civic groups. And so there is this fundamental transparency chasm that's on the one hand probably impossible to get rid of totally, but if one of the fundamentals of democracy is a kind of equal access, then that's something that you always have to consistently work on. Can you see our ways that we can improve that? Well, I've always felt sore for you folks in the legislature. If I were trying to think of a way to torture people, well-meeting people for three months, I would create the kind of ways that you have to do that kind of frenetic need to sort and understand information in a short period of time. And people always talk about the fact that legislation should meet less often. You hear these kind of things from criticism. I think it should meet more often and longer. I think that's one way. I think that getting back to this other kind of transparency issue, this is less part of the legislature and less part of what I've always seen as a kind of organizational culture, a state organizational culture that exists that is kind of inward. It's inward bound. It's self-protective. It too often sees the request for information as an intrusion. And that's something that's very, very difficult to change. And you have a state auditor. You have the public records act. But that, to me, if I were going to be, and what drives me more crazy as a citizen than anything else, it's that kind of unwillingness to step forward. It's funny, the legislative session process, it starts very open public meetings. Here's the bill. You can all see it in advance. You can comment on it. You can see where it goes. And then it gets into a more and more hidden phase. And finally, in the end, the public doesn't get to see the bill. That's right. You can't even, there's no mechanism to comment. And there's no method to even see one. So it goes, at the end, it goes into a little black box where very few people decide what's happening. Yes, yes. And you don't ever know exactly how. The other thing that happens, the first few weeks of the legislature, first of all, I could never get a place to park. If you do, it's because so many people are down there. In that sense, it's very accessible. You just got people milling across the hall and so on. But over time, that begins to narrow for all kinds of reasons. But the people near the end who are the most likely to have some idea what goes on as a relatively small group, or let's say a group of highly interested people in certain kinds of bills. Good point. Does Hawaii learn from our political mistakes or do we have political amnesia? The answer is probably a little bit of both. There's a whole lot of political amnesia. But I think that the concern is, to me, is not so much whether we learn from our mistakes. I think one of the fundamental difficulties in politics, and there's been some writing on it. A guy named Peter Schuch wrote a book. He's a political scientist and a law professor about why government fails so often. And Schuch is not a conservative. He's a very moderate guy. But his point is that the process is such that people end up getting committed so much to a certain position that once that policy with that position is adopted, there isn't all that much interest in seeing how it works. And so that's where I think there's an amnesia. And certainly we're not alone in this kind of thing. I think there's occasionally another kind of amnesia that's based on the fact that we think we're different. And we are different in lots of ways. But you know, from working in the field of agriculture, if we were all that different, you wouldn't have all these national interest groups and corporations being so interested in what happens here. And the third way, which has always interests me, is how long... This is a different kind of amnesia. It's like forgetting you passed a bill, but it hasn't been implemented yet. If you look at something like medical marijuana, what's up with this, right? They passed a bill and it's now in the 15th year and you still don't have it. And that's a different kind of amnesia. It's kind of forgetting that there has to be some kind of... that you maybe want to be much more concerned about how quickly the follow-up is. So that's what I would say about that. So a lot of it is passing a bill and then not following the story after that. Let's see what happens, what's the unintended consequences, what the good consequences, where we don't come back around to say, is this working? Does it need adjustments? We just let it float out there. I think there's a couple other reasons why that happens besides the fact that there's less interest. One of which is that there aren't a lot of outside mechanisms to do that. It takes money. And the third thing is that often one of the problems is that the monitoring process that's necessary to do that is not really in place, whether it's people to enforce the elevator rules or what else. If you read the state auditor's reports, which I mean I find them really interesting even though the language is kind of dry, there's frequently stuff in there that says, no one's watching this. How can this read... That isn't the language that they use. They kind of hold it back, but this happens over and over again. Why does it happen? We said you're not doing it this way. You guys don't know how to even write a job description for your agency. We've told you that before. It doesn't change. And unless, if that keeps happening, you know that something more dramatic has to be used to break the pattern whether it's the legislature stepping in or whatever. So I think another issue here is that the resources for monitoring and compliance are often, they get lost by the board, you get the bill passed, that's what you want, and then you don't worry about it. Okay. What could local media do to improve the transparency of our political situation? I think that, well, one of which is to keep covering more. The easy place to start with local media, as you can with media in almost any other place in the United States right now, is that it's, the resources have retreated. You have fewer people covering politics. You have fewer people covering politics who really are, understand what's going on, who have that kind of experience. So that's certainly one thing that's part of this. I think that, I've always been, and that affects the ability to do investigative reporting. Some of these things are about in-depth work. It's not always about scandal, but in-depth kind of work, and that takes a tremendous amount of resources. If you ever look at who wins Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting, it's a team of people that the particular newspaper or television station devoted a lot of resources to. I think the other thing, one other quick one, is that the, too often, the people in the media look where, they're looking for keys, not necessarily where the keys are, but where the light's shining. So that, I think that today's media doesn't really know how to cover the modern political campaign. Not so much at the state legislative level. That's another issue, because you've got so many seats, and it's hard to cover them and so on. But if the modern political campaign uses big data in a much more sophisticated way and does a lot more sophisticated grassroots politicking than used to be the case, if you want to get people to understand what's going on, you can't simply cover the speeches or the press releases. You have to go into the field a little bit more and try to understand that. And that's labor intensive. That's very hard to do. And Civil Beat, I think, has picked up on some of these kinds of things in all of these. But I think, you know, the TV station that I work for has a much smaller staff than it used to have lost political reporters over time, and they don't really do as much about politics. They're not alone there. I want to ask you more about politics and coverage of campaigns and things. But before we go to a break, tell me, have you written, I'm intrigued by your book called The Gift of Underpants. Have you written other books? Well, back in the day when I did academic stuff, yeah. You wrote a few books. Right. The books that you write, those comes from the head. The other kind of stuff comes from the heart. I wrote a book on way back when my first book was on the Miranda decision. How police departments reacted to it. That was originally my dissertation. I've written a book on sex education and community conflict. We did a book on conflict resolution and mediation. Those are really the main. I've contributed to lots of other stuff. That was then. Well, Neil, when we come back, tell me a little bit about your most recent book. But we got to take a break. This is Senator Russell Ruderman. We're here with Neil Milner at the Ruderman Roundtable. We'll be right back. Looking to energize your Friday afternoon? Tune in to Stand the Energy Man at 12 noon. Aloha Friday here on Big Tech Hoy. I'm Jay Fidel, host of Life After Statehood. And I do this with our regular contributor, Ray Tsuchiyama. And we tried to make sense of all that has happened in Hawaii, all that is happening, and all that should happen. Ray, what do you think of that show? I feel delighted to be part of Life After Statehood. Since after 59, so many things happened to the state of Hawaii, yet things could have gone in other directions. And that's what I'm fascinated about, that Hawaii has had a great history, but could have an even greater future. There you go. I believe that. I'm with you all the way. Ray Tsuchiyama and me, Jay Fidel, we do it as much as we can on Life After Statehood. Come around and see what we have to say. Thanks. Aloha and welcome back. I'm State Senator Russell Ruderman. I'm from the Puna and Ka'u District on the Big Island. And we host the Ruderman Roundtable here on Think Tech Hawaii. To discuss politics and environmental issues. And I'm here today with Neil Milner. And Neil, you mentioned a little bit about various books you've written and your most recent one is called The Gift of Underpants. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Sure. It's a group of, it's about 12, 13 stories that I've written, that I wrote over the years. Sort of memoirs, but they're personal stories, but they're not really in any chronological order. It's about my growing up Jewish and Milwaukee and my growing and my spending, most of my adulthood, as a Halloween Hawaii. And so the stories, it isn't quite that simple, but the stories go back and forth. And it's mainly about how people who live far away from where their roots are try to keep some kind of connections. And it's mainly, let's just say it's more funny than serious. It's a humorous book. It's a humorous book. I hope so. I'm sure that it is. I look forward to reading it, by the way. So we were talking about media coverage of our politics and government situation. What do you think how does the media here do about covering campaigns? They covered enough? Not enough? Not in depth? Well, I think what I said before is a good example. I don't, they, I think there's a couple of examples in the last one that's really, that I wanted to end up talking about. But I'll just quickly summarize what I was saying before is this, that the media tends to cover things about campaigns that are easy to cover. And that means that the audience makes assumptions that when a person gives a speech that that's really the crucial thing, or when there's a mistake on a particular day, when there's a lot of other things going on, that if you want to understand the campaign, you maybe have to go into the grassroots a little bit more. I was really astonished here by how little coverage the media gave to the Trump campaign in Hawaii, particularly who the Trump supporters are. Now they got absolutely no help from the Republican Party itself, which kind of buried its head in the sand before Trump, you know, before the Republican caucus when they said he's never going to do well here. He's too plight. We're too plight for Donald Trump, that's what Pat Psyche said. But no one ever really worked very hard to try to explain the fact that, look, you know, you can parcel out what Trump voters are like on the mainland, but that's not necessarily saying the same thing here. One of the things I think that the media missed, besides looking at whether there's a kind of disaffection with Democrats here, is the fact that when all is said and done, most Republicans nationally voted for Trump, which is not a surprise because you were pretty tribal in our party identification. We tend to stick with it. And so I think those were fundamental things that didn't get enough attention here because everybody knew that Trump was going to lose, and because the presidential candidates never come here, it loses a kind of salience of visibility. But I think that's a mistake. I think what that does is really kind of perpetuate the notion that everything that our culture makes us different. And that's not a good way, that's a kind of default way to explain things. The thing that makes us different politically for most places in the country is the fact that we're overwhelmingly Democrat. That's where you start. Now you can look for cultural explanations for that, although I don't think that works very well. But that's what I always worry about this place, that the less you look closely at how people behave here, the more you buy into the kind of cultural myths about this place that I think are not only wrong, I think they're demeaning. And the media could... The media could, yeah, that's a more fun... The media is just a small part of that, but the media helps to create a picture of this place, and the picture of this place is so well-developed that it's hard to cut through it. But I think the media could do a little bit better job. I mentioned a couple things. So one was media coverage of the Trump campaign. Was there another aspect you were going to talk about? No, the other one was, I think, was the understanding the role that grassroots politics plays. And people will say, well, they've been covering that for a long time. Sign-holding and all of that. But what I'm saying is that that's changed. You look at how Stanley Chang covered, or, you know, Stanley Chang is a great shoe leather guy, but he also has a very sophisticated kind of smart phone computer where he can do things with data that, you know, that the old guys and the old women with signs and slippers couldn't do anymore. And I think it's important to understand that. And I think that's an important to understand that that played, I think, a significant role in his beating Sam Sloan. So the successful politician of the future has to live in both worlds? Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. I can't just ignore this new stuff. How much influence do you think dark money and political action committees have on Hawaii politics? You know, that's a hard one to answer. My intuition, my gut reaction is the answer too much. But it's hard to trace. Dark money, I worry more about influence and access generally. And certainly dark money and dark money can make a difference. PACs, certainly in the mayoral election, Kirk Caldwell ran against Ben Cayetano. Yes, clearly the PACs had, but it isn't like they were just throwing money out there. They spent money on very sophisticated political tools and resources. It wasn't simply a negative campaign that beat them. And so I think that that's the way it's likely to happen. You know, we're still a fairly small player here. And when I worry less about whether it's dark money or a PAC here, I worry more about the influence of people who are constant givers, constant big givers, the same group of large engineering companies and construction companies and so on. That's what worries me more and that's less about the election laws and more about the whole question of access. So you may talk before a little bit about inequality of access. And I'm very intrigued by that. I live and represent the big island where we, I feel, there's different levels of access to our state government, depending on whether you live on Oahu or whether you live on an island. Myself, I can fly over here, it's part of my job, it's fine. But someone from my district who wants to testify or ask questions or find an information or a lobby, they really can't, not in the same sense that an Oahu residence can. Is that part of the inequality of access? Sure, it's part of the inequality of access, but that's constantly, that's historically a problem. If you live in a rural area in Wisconsin, for example, you're going to have that kind of problem, and it's part of the reason that, just a small part of the reason that upstate Wisconsin, that area that turned against Hillary Clinton and voted for Trump, they have very negative notions of what happens down in Madison at the Capitol. Now part of it is that they basically think they're a bunch of comies, but the other part of it is, and this is a stronger argument, they feel like nobody really understands what they're like, nobody understands that even though, in theory, their kids can go to the university there, they don't get the same quality of education back in the small towns, those kinds of things. The fact that it's on an island makes the issue even worse, and I don't know, there's certainly no way to make it possible for you. I can't imagine you're going to let anybody fly for free over to this island. You can tie it into hearings. When I was new here, the answer seemed so obvious, video conferencing and video testing. And we are in the age of technology. On the big island, I can testify at the county council from four different locations around the island just to save me from driving 45 minutes. And yet I can't do that. My constituents cannot do that to the state legislature, which is entirely solvable. We could fix it, we could address it. It's my feeling that the powers that we don't want are public. Who are the powers that be in that situation? Well, let me ask you that, to keep myself out of trouble. Well, I just mean that there's a tendency. We talked about the closed nature of the legislature towards the real decision-making process and the power being in very few hands. It seems to me that there is not much desire for more public input. In fact, many people in the legislature would rather see less public input. I think that plays into the decision to not allow video conferencing. I think if that's true, and I don't have any reason to think that it's not true, that that's very consistent with the attitude that a lot of that kind of state agency organizational culture has, where it's seen as interference and it isn't even necessary so much hiding things. The fear of chaos and the fear of opening things up. I don't have much sympathy for that position. I agree with you that at the very least you could do video conferencing. When I've done work, some consulate work on the neighbor islands, and when I've watched elections, I've always amazed at how much more intensive and competitive politics is on the big island. I mean, you actually have contests for mayor all the time. I remember running a community meeting on the airport in Kauai a few years ago. My God, there was 150 people that showed up and they had it on close-circuit television and did all kinds of stuff. I think that the legislature, the people who don't want this, tend to lose an ocean. Let me add one other thing to this. I'm always amazed at how people here, how negatively they react to political protest. It's as if they never lived through the 60s or 70s. It's not even simply that they disagree with the position like by TMT, but there's a sense that these people are often vandals and so on. And I think part of that is that we've lost that firsthand experience with a kind of grassroots mass politics, even something as harmless as that. I'm sure the legislature does not appreciate those early pre-legislative protest movements that there are and haven't been any this year to speak of them. Well, there's always a couple lined up for opening day. I myself appreciate them. But I appreciate what you're saying. Tell me briefly, do you have any comments on that? State Senate just became all Democrat. One Republican we had lost the race, as you just mentioned, to Stanley Chang. What do you think about that? Well, it's not like the one vote makes a difference. Okay, here's what I think happens when you become all one party. First of all, you've been multiple parties within the Democratic party. We have caucuses, which are very mysterious. No one ever wants to see what explains them. That's the other thing. The third thing is that Sam Slum performed a function. First of all, he's one of the few walking, talking Republicans who actually say stuff. You may not like what he says, but he at least says it. And he was, he introduced a sense of irony. When you got all you folks thinking roughly in the same direction, he could sit back and say stuff that was kind of funny and a little bit probing. So I'll miss him. Thank you. And I'll miss him too. On a personal level, I enjoyed him. I was certainly, he's not the farthest from me politically. Anyway, Neil Milner, thank you very much for being a guest on the Ruderman House table. I'm Senator Russell Ruderman. We'll be back in two weeks at the Ruderman Roundtable. Mahalo, Nigerians.