NEWBERRY — Hawaii State Senator Mike and Carol Gabbard spoke to and visited with Newberry County Democrats at their monthly meeting on Thursday, Feb 20.
The Gabbards are parents of Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who is running for president.
“Tulsi’s been service-oriented all her life,” said State Senator Gabbard. “After 9-11, she enlisted in the Hawaii Guard and earned a commission as a Second Lieutenant. In her first deployment, she was sent to Kuwait to train their military. In her first address to the Kuwaiti troops, she noticed that the men wouldn’t even look at her, they kept their eyes down, focused on the ground. So instead she worked through the Kuwaiti officers and NCOs, teaching them what their troops needed to know. When she turned 21, she told me, ‘Dad, I want to run for office.’ She started with the city council in the town where we live on Oahu, where Honolulu is located. She won that, went on to the state legislature, and then to Congress.”
Gabbard spoke also about his daughter’s seeming lack of progress in her bid for the presidency.
“She’s a fighter, dedicated to the mission. Somebody asked her, ‘You haven’t done well in Iowa and N.H. Are you going to drop out?’ ‘That’s only two states,’ she replied. ‘Last I checked there are 50 states.’”
“Tulsi reaches across the aisle in Congress. Hawaii grows a lot of coffee, so she started making coffee for members of Congress, then coffee for their staff, since they’re the ones who actually do a lot of the work. It broke the ice. Then she stated handing out Hawaiian coffee. Carol made small bags of coffee for a month. I did quality control. The effort resulted in Republicans coming to her for consultation on an amendment to a bill that eventually passed with her effort.”
“Tulsi wants us to stop blowing money on military with missions we don’t understand. We spend 5.5 million dollars an hour in Afghanistan, and the mission is still not clear. We’ve spent six trillion dollars on the military since 9-11. We could be spending that money on schools, medical care, and other badly needed things. And no,” he added, “Tulsi’s not a Russian asset.”
State Sen. Gabbard has a brother who lives in Columbia.
“When I need to get away from things for a while, I visit him.”
When asked about politics in Hawaii, he said, “We’re a deep blue state. There are 25 state senators in Hawaii; only one isn’t a Democrat.”