Obamaramma!

[Garp]

Alongside the presidential electiions, other state elections were taking place, such as state house, and other state level referendum style votes. Back in July I ended up in a 4th of July parade for a democrat, Chris Lee, going for state house for the district my fiance lives in, who was also the youngest nominee of any district of Hawaii this time around at 'just' 28. From a virtually unknown back in July, he since visited every single household twice (imagine your MP doing that for maybe a quarter of his area, it's a similar achievment, tens of thousands of households) and been sign waving at major intersections, and so on.. He made it through preliminaries where the republican candidates all failed, leaving him and Kawananakoa who is 'old money' with all the old boys school connections, the right social circles and so on; all the advantages that make a polititian to many. Kawananakoa was rather arrogant and dismissive of Chris, until tthings like the local newspapers started to support him, and other social and business groups too. Last week in a desperate vote grap Kawananakoa sent a proffessional leaflet around pointing out why he was better, with rather dirty tactics, e.g. each school he'd attended had 'graduated' next to it whilst Chris just had 'attended', despite graduating highly, and so on. That didn't go down too well amongst the locals, and on Tuesday Chris won the place with a whopping 66% of the votes. Poor guy has been up at 4:30 every day to sign wave for the last 4-5 months, along with everything else, but no rest for the wicked. Tuesday he was up late for the results and then Wednesday saw another 4:30 start, waving a 'mahalo' sign (thank you) before heading in for a full first day in the new role!