By Jerry Burris
Advertiser Editorial Editor

Since the news has dribbled out in bits and pieces over time, many people may not be fully aware of the enormous changes under way in Hawai'i's political and campaign fund-raising climate.

Dozens of people have been arrested, nearly as many criminally charged, at least one prominent businessman has already been found guilty and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines have been levied.

It must be said right off the bat that being arrested, let alone being charged, is no evidence of guilt. But the raw fact is that many of those arrested or charged already had paid big-time fines to the state Campaign Spending Commission for campaign violations.

In effect, they have acknowledged breaking the rules. The only question is whether in so doing they committed crimes.

In any other context, this would add up to what looks and smells like a major crime wave. But the community reaction has been, if not entirely blase, then at least relatively ho-hum.

Part of the explanation may be that the people being swept up in this political dragnet are not your typical bad guys. Indeed, they are community leaders, successful business people and others of standing.

But another explanation may be that — among those who are in the game, at least — the accusations amount to little more than business as usual.

At some point, the message will have to get through that business is no longer as usual. Two quotes dramatize the changes under way:

The first was from defense attorney Earle Partington, who represented one of the criminal defendants in the campaign-spending probe.

"Quite frankly," said Partington, "all these illicit donations have been part of a system that's existed forever in Hawai'i. It's only recently that we've become mature enough to crack down on them."

The bookend to that quote comes from Honolulu Prosecutor Peter Carlisle, who is clearly eager to turn up the heat on the campaign funding system.

"The purpose of this work is very simple," Carlisle said. "that is that this stuff, from this day on, stops going on."

Fundamentally, what has happened is a sea change in the attitude of regulatory authorities, from the spending commission to the criminal prosecutors.

In the past, when individuals or businesses were discovered contributing more than the law allowed, the fix was simple: The politician in question would return the money, the books would be rewritten and — at times — a small civil fine would be imposed. These modest penalties were little more than the cost of doing business in the high-stakes game of political fund-raising.

The fact that this habit of overcontributing was so widespread, so common, is proof enough that it had become an ingrained aspect of the Hawai'i political culture.

That's now changed. Even if many of the arrests and charges evaporate, there has been embarrassment enough to go around. It is clear that future campaigns and future fund-raising efforts will look substantially different.