LIHUE — Sherry Alu Campagna sat at a table in the middle of Ha Coffee Shop in Lihue, one of the few places on the island with anything approaching creds as a political hangout.
She was on island from her home on Oahu recently, on one of her first visits to Kauai after announcing her campaign to unseat U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard in the August Democratic primary.
Realizing the complexity of it, she summarized her objectives for 2018: “I’m running for Congress, getting a divorce and fighting with Sylvia Luke for $84 million.”
Just looking at Campagna’s face is enough to confirm the Hawaiian part of her ethnicity, which she describes with a hint of amusement as “Native Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese and Polish.” She’s 47 — 10 years older than the incumbent Gabbard — and announced her candidacy formally last November.
The Sylvia Luke part requires a little explanation, but says a lot about Campagna, who, if elected, would be the first Native Hawaiian woman to serve in Congress.
She is the mother of four children, ranging in age from 4 to 17. She bore two of them. The other two came to her as foster placements. She keeps her kids’ lives private, but her 12-year-old son is a student at Kamehameha School. “I’m the one with the separation anxiety,” she quipped.
In 2014, Campagna joined a class action lawsuit in which she and 6,000 other foster parents alleged that the State of Hawaii had shortchanged the foster care program by tens of millions of dollars by unfairly limiting the monthly allowance for foster homes to $649 per month. It is a figure the plaintiffs contended was impossibly low.
The case eventually settled, with the state on the hook for as much as $84 million by raising the foster care allowance to $776 per child. Only then, Luke, a powerful Oahu member of the state House of Representatives, blocked inclusion of the settlement money in the state budget. It was a blow to foster parents throughout Hawaii. The controversy is ongoing. Luke did not respond to questions about the incident posed by The Garden Island.
But that is far from Campagna’s only credit in the public arena. She is an environmental scientist and business owner, and she was the Hawaii state chair for the Women’s March on Washington, a huge international observance on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president. She also serves on the Hawaii Commission on the Status of Women.
The march exploded into an outpouring of rage by both women and men and what the Washington Post estimated as 4.1 million people nationwide, including 500,000 in Washington, 8,000 in Honolulu and 1,500 in Lihue, where the march morphed into a sign-waving rally at the airport intersection. Another 3 million were estimated to participate in other countries.
It was, by most estimates, the largest social protest event ever staged.
Campagna was not among the Honolulu participants. She was in Washington with a contingent of about 100 Hawaiians carrying banners that read “Aloha.” They formed a kind of conga line that snaked through the tightly packed crowd near the National Gallery of Art.
Her demeanor is reserved, but determined. She will need both as she tries to unseat the popular Gabbard, who has built a following of unusually personal loyalty on Kauai since she was first elected in 2012. Campagna’s objective may seem unreachable to some, but her determination is not to be underestimated.
Campagna said she will refuse all money from political action committees and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and plans to run a down-to-earth, grassroots campaign — all for about $250,000. The conventional political odds probably say she has set out to accomplish an impossible task. But it is undeniable that political times are changing at an overwhelming pace.
In addition to women’s and environmental issues, Campagna’s priorities include homelessness and health care access. She also hopes to focus on issues important to Hawaii agriculture.
“District 2 is the breadbasket of our state,” she said. “We need to connect resources relating to land, capital and water.”
Campagna said she is running because she believes Gabbard has focused disproportionately on foreign policy issues and taken positions on a wide range of defense and other issues at the expense of serving constituents of congressional District 2, which includes all of the Neighbor Islands and some rural and suburban areas on Oahu.
Campagna said Gabbard’s reluctance to support Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee over Bernie Sanders is part of Gabbard’s problem, as well as her visit to Syria and meeting with its president, Bashar al-Assad, her refusal to cosponsor an assault weapons ban in the House of Representatives and her decision to meet with Trump during the transition.
Gabbard’s campaign responded: “There is nothing more important to the people of Hawaii than peace.”
Gabbard, the statement continued, “has made it clear that one or the main reasons she ran for Congress was to fight for peace and an end to our country’s interventionist regime change wars.”
But, the campaign said, that does not mean Gabbard has neglected Hawaii and her district constituents. The statement cited Gabbard’s support for infrastructure funding, moving away from fossil fuels, an increase in food stamp payments, protecting water resources and working to protect Social Security as among her achievements.
As to contemplating a presidential run, the campaign said that Gabbard “is focused on doing her job, serving the people of Hawaii and has not commented on any hypothetical 2020 candidates.”
The two candidates’ other differences are striking. Campagna leads Gabbard 4-0 in the kids department. Gabbard surfs; Campagna paddles. Campagna is 47 and has a broader range of experience outside of politics; Gabbard is 37 and has spent nearly her entire career running for elected office and serving. Gabbard is a military veteran; Campagna is not. However, Campagna’s father worked for many years for a defense contractor and Campagna came to know the world of military procurement. Gabbard is from a highly political family. Her father is a member of the state Senate and longtime force in Hawaii politics. Campagna has no such lineage.
Campagna is under no illusion that unseating Gabbard will be easy — if it is possible at all. But one thing that sticks in her craw most is Gabbard’s perceived focus on international military issues, particularly in Syria.
“Can’t we just be against regime change? We need someone who truly represents the people of Hawaii,” she said.
“It all comes back to the money. We’ve had 10 years of putting band-aids on things. We need corporations that care,” she said with more than a hint of exasperation.
But, she conceded, “I don’t have a solution for how to compel them. One of the most important things is that most change is from the inside out.”
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Allan Parachini is a former journalist and PR executive. He is a Kilauea resident.
