Politics in usually polite Manoa turned a bit guerrilla Tuesday night.

Nancie Caraway, a scholar and activist and the wife of U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, surprised some of her neighbors by yanking down a "Case for Senate" campaign sign from a community garden and then driving away.

Neighbors said Caraway, who, like her husband, supports U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka over Case in the Democratic primary for Senate, pulled her car over to the side of the road near the garden. She got out and headed straight for the Case sign, which was propped up against a coconut tree.

Caraway grabbed the sign, folded it in half, got into her car and left, said Joe Feind, a mechanical engineer who lives nearby.

Caraway said she would have removed the sign even if it had been one of her husband's. In her view, placing the sign there politicized the garden.

"As a lifelong advocate of preserving Hawai'i's aesthetic and visual environment, I felt it had no place in this public setting," she said in an e-mail. "I removed the sign as I would have had it been an Abercrombie sign, an Iwase sign, a Kawananakoa sign or any other campaign sign.

"It was in poor taste to place a sign there, and whoever did should have known better."

Feind said he told C. Richard Fassler, who had placed the Case sign there while he tended the garden, that Caraway was taking it away.

Fassler said he turned in time to see Caraway's car pull off. "I thought these guys were supposed to be the nice guys," said Fassler, a Case supporter who is active in Neighborhood Watch.

Fassler said Caraway left the folded sign on his lawn yesterday. "I was hoping there was going to be some kind of note of apology, but there was nothing," he said.

Reach Derrick DePledge at ddepledge@honoluluadvertiser.com.