Politics & Power Quote by Linda Lingle

“Good schools, good jobs, good government” lands like a chant because it’s built for the stump: three short, concrete nouns, each one a pocket-sized promise voters can repeat on the drive home. Linda Lingle’s intent isn’t subtle. She’s framing civic basics as overdue deliverables, not ideological luxuries, and she’s trying to pull the debate out of partisan abstraction and into kitchen-table metrics. The phrase “not unreasonable demands” is doing quiet rhetorical work: it positions critics as out of touch if they resist, while absolving the speaker of radicalism. She’s not asking for miracles; she’s asking for competence.

The subtext arrives in the pivot: “sadly, some of our people have already lost heart.” That line converts policy failure into an emotional injury, then immediately ties it to a uniquely Hawaiian pressure point: out-migration. In Hawaii, leaving isn’t just relocation; it’s separation from land, family networks, and identity. By foregrounding those departures, Lingle invokes a moral ledger: government mismanagement doesn’t merely raise costs, it breaks community continuity.

Context matters. Hawaii’s high cost of living, limited housing supply, and a tourism-dependent economy have long pushed locals to the mainland for opportunity. Lingle’s sentence compresses those structural forces into a political mandate, implying the state has been bleeding talent and hope because leadership hasn’t met baseline obligations. It’s a pragmatic, slightly chastising appeal: if we can’t deliver the fundamentals, we’re not just losing elections - we’re losing people.