By Jerry Burris
Advertiser Editorial Editor

When the history is written, 2002/2003 will likely go down as watershed years in Hawai'i politics.

The headline most likely will be the Republican takeover of the governorship after 40 years of Democratic domination. But there's been another major political shift that lacks the immediacy of an election but could have as much impact on local politics as Linda Lingle's victory.

That other shift is a fundamental change in the way the game of campaign financing is played. It begins with an aggressive Campaign Spending Commission and its director Bob Watada.

The traditional ethic at the commission was to pursue compliance and disclosure. That makes sense as far as it goes, but it left people relatively unconcerned about complying with the letter of the law. Sanctions, either for contributors or for candidates, were minimal.

The new ethic at the commission has been to forcefully seek out violators and hit them with the required fines. But more critically, the information has gone over to prosecutor Peter Carlisle for possible criminal prosecution.

That brings things to an entirely new level.

Last week, Carlisle got a prominent local businessman and government contractor to plead no contest to felony and misdemeanor charges of illegal campaign contributions.

The charges center on a procedure known as "bundling" in which an eager contributor gets around campaign donation limits by encouraging or effectuating maximum contributions from a large group of fellow workers, family and friends.

Watada has said that this one company got almost a half-million dollars into the hands of local political candidates between 1996 and 2001. That is wildly out of sync with what the law supposedly allows.

The reason this represents a seismic change for politics is that bundling is nothing new in Hawai'i. If you took the time to go back over old campaign spending records for almost any major politician, you would find patterns of contributions — often on the same day and for the same amount — from long lists of people associated with a particular company or individual.

It was clear what was happening, but little was ever done about it.

Now, if Carlisle has his way, future participants in this game could be facing jail time.

Laws setting contribution limits were presumably built on the theory that without limits, some people would gain far more influence or access than others simply on the strength of how much cash they kicked in. But we have been told that these bloated contributions didn't buy any particular access or insider rights to government contracts.

In essence, there was no quid pro quo.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that this is true. But in politics, appearances are everything. And when a major winner of government contracts pleads no contest to having contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars illegally, the appearance issue is brutally stark.

It may be that the political culture will change once again and we will be back to business as usual. But don't count on it.