 Good afternoon. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers. I'm your host, Carl Campania. I'm going to begin today's show with a Trump dump. That's what I've kind of been doing for the last couple of weeks, several weeks perhaps, is just throwing in some commentary on some things that have been happening. So in the last couple of days, what has come up are two different things. Number one, there's Trump saying that he wants to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, okay? And then there's also the reports coming out that he wants to repeal or pull back or recall the mandatory contraception bill, a portion of the Affordable Care Act. Okay, just real quick. With the contraception piece, an important thing to know is we are right now, as a result of the contraception mandate, we have the few newest number of abortions across the country that we've had in over 40 years. And that is as a result of the mandatory insurance coverage for contraception. That is a real thing. I'm going to say, first of all, I am personally, I am pro-choice. I am pro-consurception. I am also anti- abortion. I don't think we should have them just all over the place. They need to be minimized and reduced as far as possible. What I want to know is how it's possible. You can call yourself anti-abortion and refused and be unwilling to provide an alternate solution. They want to pull this back and provide what? That's kind of like, if you've got a water leak, you know, leak in your water faucet, it's saying the best way to solve the leak in your water faucet is to turn the faucet all the way on. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Not at all. Next week I'm going to go into the climate thing where he's about to pull us out of the climate agreement is what the reports are of this Paris Agreement. We're going to be the only major country in the world that is going to not be a part of this. And we are the second largest producer of gases, of greenhouse gases, and we're just going to pull out of it. For the purpose of what? A few coal jobs that he's promised to get when really we have 150 times more renewable energy jobs than we do coal jobs? Why aren't we retraining people? Why aren't we moving in that direction? So anyway, there's my Trump dump for the day. We can let that go and talk about it more later. For the rest of this show, I wanted to talk about and I'm really thrilled today. I wanted to talk about a couple different issues. I'm going to start off with primarily though, I want to talk about the Big Tent Theory in politics and specifically here in Hawaii. The values and the consequences and I don't know, some of the challenges within that idea. So to help this discussion, I'm very thrilled today to have Mr. Alex Santiago, former chair of the State Party, as well as director of the No Vote No Grumble program. Welcome to the show, Mr. Alex Santiago. Thank you for having me on. Thank you for nice to get to meet you and talk to you and get to know you. Thrilled. This is the first time. It's not the first time we've met, but it's the first time we've actually had a chance to really talk. So thank you for coming to the show. Thanks for having me on. Before we go into the topic of the day, tell us a bit about, I just laid a little bit up, but tell us a bit about yourself, what you've done and how you've gotten where you are now. Sure. I usually start by saying I'm a social worker by background. My profession is I'm a social worker and I teach at the university right now, the macro policy stuff. I love it. I found my calling, I think. But my previous life was in politics. I was a state representative from 1990 to 2000, representing the district of the North Shore. I retired in 2000, so I walked out the front door. I didn't get kicked out by my community. I kind of wanted to make sure that it was, you know, you leave when you're still wanted, kind of a thing. But I enjoyed it. It was 10 years, 10 wonderful years. I served during a time when I think the culture was a little different back in those days, how politics run. Anyway, so when I got out... It's from the 90s into 2000. Yes, absolutely. And I had been involved actually from before. And long story about how I actually got into running for office. But it was the right choice for me to make at the time. Since then, since retiring, I have done a number of different things. I started the organization or I was one of the founders of Focus, Protecting Hawai'i Zohana Children, Underserved, Elderly and Disabled. It was meant to be an advocacy voice for the underserved. They've kind of taken it on a different path since there was a disagreement between the board and myself, the board that I put together. But that's a whole other story. And so I started that. That was a major part of post-politics. And then I am a consultant now and I'm with the No Vote No Grumble Program, which I'm really, really excited to be a part of. It's under the Partners in Development Foundation organization. And we have a CEO that is really forward thinking. So when he asked me to... And we actually work together with Focus. So we're looking at engaging the community. Civic engagement is the key. We're at a time right now where perhaps there's more civic engagement than there has been for a long time. And yet we see such... We can talk about that, because we talked about before coming in, sometimes people having disagreements and agreeing to disagree. But I think that there is great deal of civic engagement by certain groups. I think that they're indicating by the number of how people aren't voting anymore, which is one indicator of civic engagement. I think that there's a tendency on the part of a lot of people to want to shut out the noise. There's so much noise going on right now. And there's so much negativity. And there's so much... People are just pulling back and they're just saying, I don't want to be a part of that. So that's what we're trying to say. We need them engaged, everyone. We need everyone engaged. And no example of really larger than what happened last year in the unexpected victory of Trump. No example larger than that indicates what showing up to vote actually means, and the consequences thereof. Agree with him, disagree with him. The fact that there... There were a lot of people who voted, but then there were a lot of people who did not still. It was what? Second or third highest total number of votes, which was still not all of the people. It was not a majority of the people still voting who have... who are registered to vote or who are of age to vote, and they still didn't vote. So that goes back to the no vote, no grumble. So how long has that been around? Oh, we've been over 10 years now, no vote, no grumble. And we've been just... We're not high profile, although we have done some gubernatorial debates that were somewhat high profile. We tend to be, I like to call us the worker bees, the volunteers. And we have lots of partners. And we've just been into trenches. We've conducted just, I don't know, how many voter registration drives. And it's been... And I've had students that have just been incredible working with us. So it's been a fun number of years that I've been with them, yeah. Yeah, a few years ago I was a region chair for the Democratic Party. And one of the things I'm more proud of is that I was actually able to pull together a group of five to 10 people and we would set up voter registration booths. What I did was I had contact with some of the owners of farmers markets. So there are several farmers markets across the island. So I coordinated with them and they said, okay, well, as long as you do wide open and it's not partisan, we'll give you a booth. So we got to go there with a booth and we got to set everything up. And over the period of six weeks, and this was in 2014, over the period of six weeks, we got 500 people registered to vote. And for the Democratic Party, we got 250 more people registered Democrats in six weeks. And I think three different locations. That's impressive. So it wasn't something that was that could go on. It was sustainable. There was a lot of factors. You always need the people, right? That can do that. But I think that having the opportunity to be out there to engage the people in a conversation, to let them see, look, this is how simple it is. Right. Fill this out. I can't mail it in for you. But here, right, do that. We took it a step further. We actually did voter registration drive. When we walked house to house, we knocked on doors and we had we cut turf where we actually looked at who in the house was registered, who wasn't. And we would, when we knocked on the door, if Mrs. came to the door, we say, it's Mr. Home, because, you know, we noticed you're registered, but he's not. And we'd enter into law. And again, it was incredible. We had specific districts. We couldn't do this statewide. We didn't have enough volunteers. But in those specific districts that we went into, we saw an increase in voter registrations. Now, it didn't actually increase. Right. Voter. Some areas saw an increase in voter participation, actual voting on the day of the election. But most didn't, which is why we're ranked last in the nation. So what's your position then on the mail-in vote? Of course, we support that. Yeah. Of course, we're going to want to see that actually happen. I don't know why it's taking, we can talk about the politics going on in that square. There's a lot of politics that I knew what I didn't get. I'm on the neighborhood board. And it came to the neighborhood board through the League of Women Voters. And it got presented. And my neighborhood board, I didn't, I don't think I realized how I would consider perhaps conservative my neighborhood board was. They refused to pass an endorsement of that bill. Did they give a reason? Did they give a reason why? They didn't think it was necessary. Okay. And that was it. They just think it was necessary. What they didn't want was they didn't like the idea that, well, if you're going to do mail-in voting, that means you're going to reduce the actual number of polling places. Which would save us a lot of money, et cetera. Okay. But that was the debate. I'm like, there was no winning that argument. I was like, okay, I get that there's more going on to this than just what these numbers and statistics say, I think. Okay. I don't, yeah, I find that fascinating. I didn't hear that one. Yeah. But not all, not some neighborhood boards voted favorably. You know, but we made it, we made it so easy for people to vote, unlike these, and but what's interesting is because I belong to a larger group to hear what's going on in other states where it's becoming harder and harder to vote. That I find fascinating. Hawaii doesn't realize just how special and lucky we are to not have those kinds of really distasteful politics being played at the state level. Exactly. The gerrymandering of the districts, the voter suppression, all the different ways that they're going about. And it's all Republican controlled districts and states. I thought we weren't going to get into. That's just kidding. This is politics and Hawaii. That's what it is. It's those states that are doing that. This whole show is politics and Hawaii. But this, but just looking at it, I mean, yes, it's true. I mean, they want fewer people to vote. I know. It was like the guy in Montana. There was a bill in Montana to do a similar thing. They were going to reduce the number of polling places. They were going to increase the number of mail in and other ways of getting people to vote. They wanted to do this special election in a different way rather than costing $750 million. They wanted to do a mail-in voting that was going to cost like a third of that. The Republicans in that state were up in arms and they literally said, we can't have everybody in this state vote. We'll lose. They caught that on air. I think that needs to be really expressed and exposed exactly. I think it's a positive thing, a number of the court cases across the state, across the country that are flipping these, that are changing these rules, that are not disallowing some of the bans and some of the voter ID laws that are actually beginning to address the question of gerrymandering districts and how that needs to be perhaps redone because some of that is blatantly ridiculous. I got to say that I'm a little older than you are, just a little, but I think that during my generation we took for granted so many things that we just felt like would never ever be challenged because they were just, we took it for granted. They were the right things to do so they would all be in place, but I think there's a wake-up call happening all over the nation right now that you cannot take these things for granted. These were hard earned these rights and these laws that were passed were hard earned and we need to be vigilant, all the more reason for us to be civically engaged. Absolutely. How is it that there are so many people who are willing to give these up? I think it's out of ignorance. Ignorance and blind ideology. They believe that this is the best. Even if it could be looked at statistically and if you do the math, sometimes they're voting against their best interests. Whether they realize that or not, I don't know. You mean you're talking about the Trump phenomenon? Well certainly the Trump phenomenon but for in other areas too. I think that we've heard the talking heads and then you know we all watch this political junkies that we are and hear all the opinions being expressed and I think it's general consensus that the state, the United States is so fed up with what's going on in Congress that there was almost this decision that for some people who voted for Trump it's like, well we know he's terrible. Let's go let him go. But he's different in his outside. Let's take this bomb and throw it into Congress and blow everything up. Well unfortunately we see some of that. And we're seeing some of the consequences and losing some of these rights and losing some of these like global positions that we've had. I think that stuff is going to come back to bite us in ways that people don't understand. I totally agree. So we have to take a break. Okay. So that's the first segment of our show. So thank you for joining us. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers. I'm your host Carl Campania. Thanks again to my guest, Mr. Alex Santiago. We're going to come back and we are going to discuss the Big Tent Theory. So see you in one minute. Thank you. Aloha. My name is Stephen Phillip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and I'm the host of Shrink Wrap Hawaii where I talk to other Shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this. We must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at three o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Aloha. Thank you for coming back. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers. I'm your host Carl Campania. Welcome once again, Mr. Alex Santiago, Director of Vote No Grumble, former chair of the Democratic Party of Hawaii, and all-around fascinating person as I'm learning. So thank you so much for all that you've done. So let's go into my topic of the day, which is this Big Tent Theory. So I can give my thoughts on what the Big Tent Theory is. You have much more history, I'm not aging you, but you have much more history in this state with regards to politics. So tell us from your perspective what Big Tent Theory in Hawaii means in a political sense. Well I think what we see is the dominance by the Democrats over the years has played such a huge role in terms of even during my day when individuals would run for office they knew that if they didn't put a D by their name they would very few chance, little chance that they would win. So there was this desire on the part of the Democrats to increase the tent, increase the tent. I mean include everybody in the tent. When I took the role as party chair during a really difficult time that the party was going through, there was this, I'm not going to get into the people who were fleeing the party at the time because there were some, but essentially we still had the discussion about what does it mean to be a Democrat? Is there a certain like list of things you have to agree by in order to be a part of this organization? Or what percentage of those? Yeah or what percentage I mean do you do you meet a certain test or do we simply open it up and say if you want to be a part of it Komo might come in and our our I think the overall feeling at that time was we open it up you want to be a part of this come on in and be a part of it and participate and we welcome and and have the thing that I want to mention that I see missing in today's discourse is the fact that back then it was okay to disagree. We could agree to disagree and not vilify the other individual and make make them you know like well if you don't think this way then there's something wrong with you you know we we simply agreed. It wasn't personal attack. No because we were all so different. Yeah. Even during my time during the legislature I remember and I talked about this earlier with you it was really a time when there were Republicans and there weren't that as many or that many but they had a different perspective and they were allowed to voice their perspective and not be shouted down in any way but respected for it and some of them were my I considered them to be my allies and friends because I'm not totally you know as a party chair. I don't meet the whole litmus test I think for that but it was okay to agree to disagree and still be cordial and still have the dignity that I think is really important to have when you are talking about passing policies for everyone. There has to be that level and well you need it and that's where some people say if we had a stronger Republican Party here and lots of other people will argue that it's more stronger than you think it is. If we had a stronger Republican Party or more representative Republican Party that our discourse our political discourse and our policies the conversation would be better it wouldn't be it wouldn't feel so one-sided it wouldn't feel so hopeless to so many people because there would be much more of a debate and much more of a respectable debate hopefully but much more of a debate on issues and less about this is what we're doing and that's what we're doing and no one's going to say anything otherwise that's kind of how some people feel so just to so okay go back to the idea of Big Ten. Big Ten in the definition of it is Big Ten theory is there's not an ideology there's not one single ideology that the entire party gets behind and agrees upon. I see that as being fairly impossible that an entire grouping of people ten let alone ten thousand or more will agree on ten ideas in exactly the same way. I think that's impossible absolutely true but it's more about how you do that how you go about the process how you have those discussions as well but the question that comes out of that is if you've got a party that is in such a dominant position here and we have a big tent so we have everybody we welcome everybody you can be a republican last year now you can be a democrat it's okay what does it really mean once again to be a democrat what is the value of of being the big tent when it comes to actually passing policy is it a value is it a virtue is it a problem so over the years of what you've seen happen in the changes some of the republicans have become more extreme so some of the more moderate republicans have fled and said yeah we're going to go become democrats now because I don't agree with that extremism it has that been a consequence of the big ten? I'm not sure because in the big tent we have as extreme individuals as well who tend to to say you know they I remember the term dino or rhino used often by individuals who say still used yeah I know in name only but but the point being that the question I think that needs to be asked is when you have a platform that a party comes up with to what extent are the individuals who put a d or an r next to their name to what extent is the party expecting those individuals to abide by this platform that was developed by this entire party with all of this the whole thing going on and as an elected official having to had to deal with that you know there was back in our day I'm going to start using that more often in my over age there was an understanding and a flexibility and a way to deal with that I think that that allowed it to exist in in our present time I see it's still happening but in with a little more tension a bit more tension going on well that's one of the interesting I mean that that's the great point you make there is that the platform itself is what are the expectations now working from within that square building yeah everybody who says they're a democrat and those who come over and say I want to be a democrat they have to actually sign something so yes I will uphold and pursue this platform that's what they're actually saying but that isn't what actually happens when opportunities come up from session to session to actually pursue something that is in that platform agenda and nothing happens and we won't get into the accountability question of that a moment but my question is this sitting in those seats are they trying to make that decision based on what they really feel is representative from their district or are there other forces that are suggesting that they ignore it or leave it alone or drop it how do we how do we understand when they don't go along with that democratic agenda there's a that's there's so many answers there's so many so many questions that could come from what you just asked I mean I think that every elected official has a responsibility to his district pretty much first and foremost they they elected that individual so some of these these who are in conservative districts they the districts expect them to act in this moderate fashion and those who are in very very more liberal districts expect them and the same thing with the republicans so in answering the question on what they do when they're in that seat are they being more loyal to the party to their constituents or to some other forces this begs another question right I mean that's why I asked you are there other forces at play when you have such low voter turnout in areas where these individuals sitting in seats really don't think that it matters one way or the other because very few people in their district vote anyway or no one ever runs against them no or nobody runs against them then you look at the real in in recent memory for me the real um shady side I don't know how else to put it where big money and these other influences are dictating policies that for me as an insider watching what's going on I find it obscene yeah it's the only word I can use it is obscene and I look at these individuals that go back to the district and how do they justify it and then the question becomes for civic engagement to what extent are the people in their districts informed about what they just did yeah and the case in point when they're not allowed to quote vote on issues major issues whatever they might be ones that I've been pushing as well the constituents can ask them where were you on this issue and they can answer either way depending upon who they're talking to so I find that obscene disgusting yeah and needs to be changed well it's an accountability question absolutely I mean it really does dive into that part of that whole thing transparency but transparency by itself isn't always great you can't always have somebody watching everything you're doing when you're trying to make something happen I can get that point a little bit but it's the accountability side it's like okay what did you do and why did you do it or I noticed that you didn't vote on this stuff why did you not vote on it why did you abstain or why did you why were you why are you not there for 83% of an issue that you said you would otherwise be there for right why were you not even present at it so I recently had this conversation with one of the reporters at the advertiser about why they were reporting upon what actually occurred when a non-vote was taken and the reporter's response was because most of the public out there don't care and they don't understand it anyway because the minutia you're talking about is so complex and I'm sitting there thinking as an educator wait a minute shouldn't your role as a as the reporter to educate the community about what just happened and why and then have the constituents hold their legislators accountable for why they didn't question exactly why the vote wasn't taken and I got nowhere got nowhere so that's the you know I mean I know you asked about the bigger tent but we've kind of but that's that all it plays in because unless you have a a public that is informed and engaged you're not going to have this discourse which which which makes me to to in a roundabout way because I know we're running out of time just say that there has come a point in time when parties have become less and less in my opinion where the the general public is the general public is sitting out there saying you Democrats and you Republicans on the extreme ends of the spectrum I don't agree with any and all of what you're talking about and I don't trust and I don't trust exactly and look at what's going on in Congress and it's about power and it's about people saying there's just too much so the educator in me says okay so we we have a problem here we have a serious problem of a disconnect and this disconnect is not being solved right so anyway I can go on I agree with you I agree with you what I what I really what I really want to do more of and what I appreciate that you have done is that when you've gone door to door knocking and what I would like to do is not not not take a report card per sale though those aren't a bad idea necessarily but take by the way this is what has happened and here's what was voted on and not voted on door to door what do you think as a community member and by the way let your legislators know I think that would be a great huge start but the volunteers for that so unfortunately we're at the end of our show already so thank you for joining us thank you Mr. Alex Santiago for joining us I think it was great conversation I truly appreciate it looking forward to next week but thank you for joining us this is Think Tech Hawaii's Movershakers and Reformers I'm your host Carl Campania we will see you next week