The Quiet Confidence Of David Ige
“Keith called again and asked me to talk to Jimmy Kumagai, then-chairman of the Democratic Party.” Ige met with Kumagai later in the morning. Kumagai offered a long-winded history of the Democratic Party in Hawaii and asked if he could add Ige’s name to a list of possible appointees to be submitted to then-Gov. George Ariyoshi.
“I called my wife Dawn at home and asked her what I ought to do. She said being added to the list would help with my next promotion at Hawaiian Tel, but not to worry, they wouldn’t pick me. So my name was added to the list.”
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Little known, and without much of a budget, David Ige of Pearl City took on some of the biggest names in Hawaii politics in the race to be governor, and won decisively. Now comes the governing part. He's pictured here with his college sweetheart from UH and new first lady Dawn | Nathalie Walker photo nwalker@midweek.com
Mid-afternoon Kumagai called again, inviting Ige to meet with the governor. After a 20-minute talk in the kitchen area of Washington Place, Ariyoshi told Ige that he’d like to appoint him to the vacant House seat.
Ige hesitated. “I have to check with my boss,” he said to Ariyoshi, who had a press conference scheduled for 5:30, in which he wanted to announce an appointment. “I was sweating bullets. I had three engineering projects ongoing, and on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I couldn’t find a boss anywhere. So I was ready to say no, because I couldn’t lose my job.
“It’s 5:10, and I get a call from Charley Crane, the president of Hawaiian Tel. He said the governor had just called him to say he wanted to appoint me. He promised me the company’s complete support. ”
At the 5:40 p.m. news conference, Ariyoshi announced his appointment of 29-year-old David Ige to the Hawaii state House of Representatives.
Ige liked the work: “I saw immediately how an elected official could make a difference.” The following fall, he ran for a full two-year term, beating Kevin Kuroda, the better-known, better-financed son of popular state Sen. Joe Kuroda.
“I took a leave from the telephone company to campaign,” Ige remembers. “I had four brothers living in Waipahu. We held 40 coffee hours.”
Ige would work for Hawaiian Tel for 18 years, but politics derailed him from the fast track. “If you’re in a supervisor position, the distraction of politics is unfair to the people working for you.”
Still, a senior-level employee of a public utility in the Legislature raised questions of conflict. “Hawaiian Tel is a regulated public utility,” says Ige. “Seldom did legislation come before us that directly affected my employer. And the government affairs guys at the company knew enough to leave me alone.”
In 1993, Ige felt the first stirrings of executive ambition. As chairman of the House Education Committee, he joined his Senate counterpart Mike McCartney in fashioning an educational reform measure that stressed “student-centered education” and created the state’s first charter schools.
“Mike and I traveled to all the Islands visiting both public and private schools,” Ige recalls. “We joked around about running for public office, Mike for governor, me for lieutenant governor.” McCartney left politics for other pursuits soon after passage of their education bill; Ige struck out alone for the Capitol’s fifth floor.
His gubernatorial candidacy would wait another 20 years, however, until the Iges’ three children — Lauren, Amy, and Matthew — were off to Mainland colleges.
“We had several family meetings to discuss what a statewide campaign would entail,” says Dawn Ige. “We had to sense the approval of the children. They told us they’d support whatever we wanted to do.”
They decided to run — and they won.
So what manner of governor will Ige be? Time, as the saying goes, will tell.
Tokuda again: “David’s a very thoughtful guy. He’ll check the facts and he’ll think them through. But the wheels of government keep moving, and the job on the Capitol’s fifth floor is different from the one David did on the second and third floors. He’ll have to make decisions more quickly. The pressure’s simply more intense up there.”
Ige’s profession may provide a clue.
“I’m an engineer, and I know that things exist in systems,” says Ige. “Engineers in search of solutions know that you have to consider all the things that occur, that you have to work out all the pieces. It’s not just about doing the deal.”
Ige talked about a “collaborative, transformative” leadership throughout his gubernatorial campaign. Since his Dec. 1 inauguration, Ige has spent much of his time finding quality collaborators to fill his cabinet.
Ige persuaded Dr. Virginia Pressler, a respected executive at Hawaii Pacific Health, to take the post of director of the Department of Health — but it wasn’t easy.
“I talked to her a lot,” says Ige. “The first time she said no. Three, maybe four times she said no. But finally she said, ‘I should do this.'”
The pace will quicken in the new year.
There’ll be a state-of-the-state speech to present to the Legislature and 76 lawmakers — some former colleagues, some bright-eyed newbies — among all of whom the newbie Gov. Ige must find his way.
