What is needed is a demonstration of courage and initiative, not fear and love for the status quo.

“There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers, and defeat is an orphan,” remarked President John F. Kennedy to the press, just after his disastrous Bay of Pigs incident.

Said another way, in politics, everyone wants to take credit for things that are successful, and no one wants anything to do with failure.

JFK’s insightful proverb also points to a problem with the way America changes laws and policies: Anything worth changing must have the support of a majority, but things that need to be changed usually don’t ever change because too many people benefit from the status quo staying the same. 

There are some who are disappointed that Senate Bill 2381, relating to public financing for candidates to elected office, has stalled at the Legislature. The bill would have authorized, starting in the 2028 general election year, “candidates to compete without relying on money from special interests” and allowed “elected officials to make decisions free from the influence of, or the appearance that they have been influenced by, donations from special interests.”

It’s a great idea that in theory should attract widespread support, but instead is extremely controversial because it threatens the status quo that so many people have come to depend and rely on. 

“Elected officials free from the influence of, or the appearance that they’ve been influenced by special interests?” So basically a government of the people, and not mega corporations, ravenous political action committees, and partisan movements that depend on political capture to rig the rules against other people for their unique profit? Who wants that in Hawaii?

Yes, your homeroom teacher in middle school who put a banner above the class chalkboard that read, “What is popular is not always right; what is right is not always popular,” would probably be very disappointed with some of you right now, because in this case, reform requires doing the scary, unpopular, hard thing that few people understand and that most people resist. Fear is popular and fear is why most of you vote against things that would actually help you (but more on this later).

On one end of the spectrum, people are terrified about public financing of candidates because they don’t want public money going to people they don’t agree with. “What happens if the person who qualifies for public financing is a Democrat?” worries every Republican. “What happens if the candidate taking public money for their campaign doesn’t believe in climate change?” worries every progressive. 

In reality, the actual purpose of public financing — at least in theory — would be precisely to amplify the voices of people the public rarely hears from because the establishment or media suppresses them or points the bone at them in a way that the public shuns them.

You need public financing of campaigns in a democracy such as we have for the same reason you need the First Amendment — not to protect the viability of “popular” or approved speech, because everyone already does that, but to protect speech and expression that is considered unpopular and controversial, because that is the most likely to be silenced by structural violence and peer pressure.

That’s why on the opposite end of the spectrum, those who hold political incumbency or political power don’t like the idea of upstarts getting public funding for their campaigns. The late Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti famously said, “Power wears out those who don’t have it!” and the unspoken point of incumbency is to wear out one’s opponents until they give up on delusions of ever holding power themselves.

What do you think we are doing every time a member of Congress sends out “constituent updates” in the mail boasting about all the things they did and all the pictures they took with various community gatekeepers? That’s not a constituent update, that’s a political mailer in disguise paid for by taxpayers. 

What do you think we are doing every time the governor or mayor in the middle of an election year announces a new initiative with a mother-of-all-press-conferences-style unveil?

That’s not a public information event, that’s a campaign rally disguised as official executive duties. It sucks all the media air out of the room, and forces everyone — especially one’s opponents — to talk about the official narrative rather than the issues one would want to talk about.

For the incumbent, they all fully believe in public-funded campaigning — so long as they alone are the benefactor of public funds.

Public funding is an equalizer that allows potentially unpopular people who may have important issues or worthy ideas that need to be heard on the ballot. I say “unpopular” because you automatically assume and have been trained to think that “popular” means “good” and “unpopular” means “bad for you” but in our upside-down political system, you have all been trained to like things that are bad for you and resist things that would help you. 

How do I know this? When was the last time you voted to make housing more affordable? 

So this ultimately comes down to the question of legitimacy. If we believe that the purpose of our elected officials is to “do the right thing” and by that we mean what is defined in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and promote the general welfare, then someone needs to do the unpopular but very necessary thing and force a change for good by supporting publicly financed campaigns. 

Supposedly, we all elected leaders to office — people to do the right thing when it is hard — and this is the time to lead by pushing through publicly financed campaigns as a much-needed reform.

We know that money is a corrupting and controlling influence, and those who have money buy the favors and attention of those who don’t have money. In this regard, there is an iron triangle between political interests, political candidates, and the for-profit media that is difficult to break and impossible to reform using the same system that promotes and encourages the status quo.

We need an equalizer, something that forces a change, and that requires courageous legislators who are more worried about what history books will say about them than the momentary rewards of having a title of “committee chair.”

As I have said before, nothing is “dead” at the Legislature until the Legislature adjourns. Find a way to bring back SB 2381 and let’s have publicly funded campaigns. It won’t be perfect, but it will be a start, and besides, when was the last time the Legislature required perfection as a prerequisite for policy?