MAGGIE is the name of the spaniel owned by the outgoing chairwoman of Hawaii's Republican Party. That's because Jane Tatibouet very much admires Great Britain's former Tory prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. The Hawaii GOP's outgoing chairwoman
Thatcher, when she trounced Labor in 1979 to start the just-ended 18-year Conservative reign, said what politicians before her hadn't dared to say - that unions had a tyrannical grip on Britain, that the welfare state had destroyed personal responsibility and sapped institutions and that private enterprise was the needed remedy.
The next year Ronald Reagan said similar things and won the U.S. presidency. The Tory and Republican reigns have ended but a remarkable thing has happened. Britain's new Labor prime minister, Tony Blair, and the Democratic U.S. president, Bill Clinton, won in 1997 and 1996 respectively by embracing many of the Thatcher-Reagan ideas.
Tatibouet knows Hawaii is way behind the curve but says we will come around eventually. Because unions have too much control over state employees, she says, their members end up suffering with the rest of us from high taxes, inferior public education and diminished economic opportunities.
She is pleased that the Republican Party's potential 1998 governor nominee, Mayor Linda Lingle of Maui, has managed to make this point yet drawn support from the union rank and file in winning two terms.
Tatibouet's term as GOP chairwoman ends at the party's Friday-to-Sunday convention in Kona. She expects to stay on, however, as a recruiter and trainer for new GOP candidates in the 1998 election.
Her five-year record as vice-chairwoman and chairwoman shows the tiny GOP membership in the state House of Representatives increasing from four elected in 1992 to seven in 1994 and to 12 in 1996. Her 1998 goal is at least one third of the House seats, 17, which will give the GOP power to pull bills out of committee. The GOP will have its incumbents seeking re-election next year, plus a significant number of try-again defeated 1996 candidates, plus 10 newcomers who will be at the Kona convention.
She will press ahead with candidate training forums plus party help in introducing candidates to contributor sources and the provision of names and mailing labels for reaching potential supporters in their districts. She has built up the list of names of GOP members and potential supporters from 6,000 to 40,000.
She also is doing her best to get a painfully large number of "self-disenfranchised" voters, many of them prominent community members, to turn out and vote. New rules make it so easy to vote absentee from home or office, she says, that there is no valid "I'm too busy" excuse for not voting.
TATIBOUET feels GOP leaders before her focused too much on winning the state's top races at the expense of building from the grass roots.
Her grass-roots focus also includes county governments. Today GOP mayors on Maui and Kauai each have three GOP council members. Hawaii County has four GOP council members but a Democratic mayor. Honolulu, with nonpartisan elections, has a lone identified Republican on the City Council.
Another weak point is the Senate with only two Republicans. Taibouet says the concentration on the House left that as no surprise.
She is one of the owners of the Aston hotel chain, served a term in the House 1990-92, lost a race for the state Senate in 1992, then turned to party-building, first as vice-chairwoman then chairwoman for the past three years. She rules out another run for public office in 1998 but not for all time.