With less than a week until Election Day, it's a good time to look back at Hawaiʻi’s political past when backroom organizers and workers were the backbones of campaigns.
As part of an ongoing project with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Center for Oral History, we are bringing you voices from Hawaiʻi’s history.
Ethnic studies professor Ty Kāwika Tengan shares the insights of Mike Tokunaga and Bob Oshiro. They worked behind the scenes to support the late Gov. John A. Burns.
Mike Tokunaga grew up on a plantation in Lahaina and fought with the 100th Infantry Battalion during World War II. After the war, he graduated from the University of Hawaiʻi and got involved in politics with his buddy Dan Aoki of the 442nd. Tokunaga described himself as a “foot soldier and organizer” who helped build Hawaiʻi’s Democratic Party.
Tokunaga: In the early campaigns, up until when Dan Aoki and I ran the [Burns] campaigns from '54 to '66, it was physically and mentally tiring because we didn't have the money to go mass media, TV and everything else, and most of it was manpower work. Once the media started being used, it was selling an image, and it's like selling apples, and if the candidates look delicious, you know, you're going to sell. Consequently, you don't have that staying at the headquarters until 2 a.m., 3 a.m., you know, and sometimes, Dan Aoki used to sleep at the headquarters, you know. I had a policy. I would never sleep at the headquarters. After my heart attack, I never stayed down there beyond midnight.
As far as running campaigns, Tokunaga said Bob Oshiro was the best. Oshiro, a former legislator and country lawyer from Wahiawa, was chief strategist for Burns’ 1970 reelection campaign — remembered now mainly for the memorable “Catch A Wave” television ad. But for Oshiro, the real story of that campaign was at the grassroots. As Oshiro would say, “Relationships are what counts in politics—the touches.”’
Oshiro: I remember going to coffee hours in early '69 when I had only two people. I would drive all the way to Kāneʻohe and talk to two people. Two, sometimes four, sometimes five. These were people who were once so-called Burns people, but they were turned off for whatever reason. So, it (was) a matter of getting them to see the big picture, to get them to believe again in the dream that we had, and all that. So, once you convince — whether it's one, two, three, or five people — if you sell them in their heart, without you telling them, they are messengers. That's how you get the numbers. We had a good system.
That system worked again in 1986 when Oshiro ran John Waiheʻe’s campaign for governor.
Oshiro: It's so easy to rely on media, and media is something everybody sees, and all that. But, in the Waiheʻe campaign, we were out-blitzed media-wise. But at the very beginning, I told our people, "The media blitz is coming. We've got to sell our candidate to the grassroot people, to the point where anticipating the media coming, they cannot be dislodged." That's the key. In (the) '70 campaign, that's what we did. You have 30,000 people who are locked in, and no media can dislodge them. As a matter of fact, the media, all it does, "Eh, we've got to work harder," you know. Meantime, we're telling our people, "Eh, we're poor, we're broke. We're the underdog." You know, what it does. It traumatizes our troops into, "Eh, we gotta work harder."
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This collaboration is supported by the SHARP Initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities through the American Council of Learned Societies.
