Case leveled the charge after Lingle didn't appear at a forum Thursday night in Kapolei.

"If she won't level with the voters now, why should anyone believe she'll level with them after the election?" Case said.

Lingle campaign spokesman Lloyd Yonenaka said at this point, "the Lingle campaign is not running against Ed Case and Ed Case is not running against Linda Lingle. We're not running against any of the Democrat candidates at this point."

After the Sept. 21 primary election, "should we win, Linda will appear in at least five public forums that have already been planned," Yonenaka said Friday.

Lingle has said she also will appear in a televised debate Oct. 25.

"Right now, we are working to get through the primary," Yonenaka said. "Our campaign strategy is to work at the grass roots level."

Case said instead of debating her opponents, Lingle has been "buying the airwaves for television spots showing her lecturing people at fake community meetings."

"She seems to think she can just avoid any real discussion of the issues and hide behind her millions worth of spin," he said.

Although she also was a no-show at the Kapolei community forum, Democratic Lt. Gov. Mazie Hirono earlier in the day appeared at a rally at the Hawaii Government Employees Association's headquarters for candidates endorsed by the union.

She criticized Case's calls for downsizing state government and told the rally she would protect jobs of public workers.

"My solution is to grow the economy and to have an effective state government without sacrificing people," she said.

Case told reporters at the Kapolei rally that Hirono does not want to face the tough questions about the state's budget crisis which if not addressed would see the state in a $329 million deficit by fiscal year 2005.

Lingle, meanwhile, admitted she shouldn't have issued a controversial news release against Gov. Ben Cayetano while serving as mayor of Maui during the 1998 gubernatorial campaign.

"This is too political to come out of a government office," she said. "It's one piece of paper in a year-and-a-half campaign, and if I had to do it again, I wouldn't do this," she said in a meeting with reporters and editors of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on Thursday.

"You know, in the '98 race, I don't know if you all recall, but he put the entire state work force in the employ of his campaign, basically," she said.

Earlier this week, the Democratic Party of Hawaii filed complaints with the Maui County Board of Ethics and the state Campaign Spending Commission over the 1998 news release.

The party said Lingle violated the ethics code by using county personnel and resources to prepare the news release and then failed to report the value of the county-paid news release as a contribution to her campaign.