Is Gov. Linda Lingle suffering burnout after six years on the job?

You have to wonder after her baffling decision to skip yesterday's governors meeting with President-elect Barack Obama. Where are the sharp instincts that got her elected Hawai'i's first Republican governor in 40 years?

The snub looks disrespectful at best, and at worst petulant for the governor of Obama's birth state, who spent weeks on the Mainland campaigning for the Republican ticket of Sen. John McCain and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Lingle had every right to support her party's candidates, but the campaign is over and now it's time to make gestures of burying the hatchet — as McCain did in a meeting with Obama soon after the election.

The new president will be asked to support many Hawai'i projects and it's time to mend fences, not burn more bridges. Even Palin was among the 41 governors attending the Philadelphia meeting called by Obama to discuss the national economic crisis and the challenges facing the states.

Lingle said she didn't go because the one-day meeting required three travel days and she was needed at home to deal with the state's growing budget deficit.

Such concerns didn't stop her from making three Mainland trips for McCain and Palin while state departments were struggling to make budget cuts of up to 20 percent she ordered. She also made an 11-day trip to Asia to promote tourism.

Her spokesmen defended the political trips by saying Lingle is able to run her administration whether she is physically in the state or not. She can't have it both ways.

Failing to demonstrate cooperation with the new president pointlessly opened Lingle to criticism from Democrats and was the latest in a series of dumb political moves you wouldn't expect expect from a Republican prodigy who got herself elected governor twice in a strongly Democratic state.

Democrats were out of line when they criticized Lingle for supporting McCain at all given Obama's popularity here. Our system depends on vigorous two-party competition and doesn't work if one of the parties lies down.

But while Lingle's support of McCain was understandable, less defensible was her decision to spend an excessive amount of time campaigning for the ticket out of state compared to other governors from either party.

While she neglected the home front, Hawai'i Republicans lost two more seats in the state Senate and one in the House, leaving them with only one-third of the number of seats they held in the Legislature before Lingle became governor.

Most questionable was Lingle's departure from the political high road; instead of campaigning on the positives of McCain's qualifications, she took the low road of disparaging the Hawai'i roots of Obama, who was born here and mostly raised here through high school.

Such cheap shots seemed especially disingenuous coming from somebody who was born in Missouri and raised in California.

Obama has been magnanimous with those who opposed him and certainly won't punish Hawai'i because of Lingle's opposition, or even do anything outwardly to slap down Lingle herself.

More likely, he'll mostly ignore her and work on Hawai'i matters through the all-Democratic congressional delegation and local supporters like Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann, possibly Lingle's most formidable rival in her anticipated attempt to win a seat in Congress.

Lingle pulled an impressive 61.7 percent of the votes in her 2006 re-election, but Obama did her 10 percent and 110,000 votes better in Hawai'i this year.

Hannemann didn't approach Lingle's 2006 vote percentage in his re-election this year, but he got 17,000 more votes than she did on O'ahu in the higher-turnout presidential year.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net. His columns are archived at www.volcanicash.net. Read his daily blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com.