Senator Inouye of Hawaii, elected in 1959, dies at 88

WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON Recovering from war wounds that left him with one arm, Danny Inouye wanted a cigarette and needed a light.

The nurse at the Army hospital in Michigan threw a pack of matches on his chest. He wanted to curse her. Instead, she taught him how to light it one-handed.

"Then she said, 'I'm not going to be around here for the rest of your life. You'll have to learn how to light your own matches, cut your own meat, dress yourself and do everything else. So from now on you're going to be learning,'" Inouye recalled decades later.

From that moment on it seemed like nothing would stop a determined Daniel K. Inouye, who died Monday after a uniquely American life defined by heroism in war and decades of service in the Senate -- and a lifelong love of Hawaii symbolized by his last utterance.

"Aloha."

Inouye, who broke racial barriers on Capitol Hill and played key roles in congressional investigations of the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, was 88.

A senator since January 1963, Inouye was currently the longest serving senator and was president pro tempore of the Senate, third in the line of presidential succession. His office said Monday that he died of respiratory complications at a Washington-area hospital.

Less than an hour after Inouye's passing, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Inouye's death to a stunned chamber. "Our friend Daniel Inouye has died," Reid said somberly. Shocked members of the Senate stood in the aisles or slumped in their chairs.

Inouye was a World War II hero and Medal of Honor recipient who lost an arm to a German hand grenade during a battle in Italy. He became the first Japanese-American to serve in Congress, when he was elected to the House in 1959, the year Hawaii became a state. He won election to the Senate three years later and served there longer than anyone in American history except Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who died in 2010 after 51 years in the Senate.

President Barack Obama, a native of Hawaii, said in a statement, "Tonight, our country has lost a true American hero with the passing of Sen. Daniel Inouye. ? It was his incredible bravery during World War II -- including one heroic effort that cost him his arm but earned him the Medal of Honor -- that made Danny not just a colleague and a mentor, but someone revered by all of us lucky enough to know him."

Obama also sent a tweet that ended "Aloha, Danny."

Inouye died after a relatively brief hospitalization. Once a regular smoker, he had a portion of a lung removed in the 1960s after a misdiagnosis for cancer. Just last week, he issued a statement expressing optimism about his recovery.

Despite his age and illness, Inouye's death shocked members of the Senate.

"I'm too broken up," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who becomes president pro tem of the Senate. Leahy also is poised to take over the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie will appoint a replacement, choosing from a list of three candidates selected by the state Democratic Party. "We're preparing to say goodbye," Abercrombie said. "Everything else will take place in good time."

Whomever Abercrombie appoints would serve until a special election in 2014.

Inouye has represented Hawaii since it became a state in 1959, first in the House. He was handily re-elected to a ninth term in 2010 with 75percent of the vote.

Inouye became president pro tem of the Senate in 2010, a largely ceremonial post that also placed him in the line of succession to the presidency, after the vice president and the speaker of the House.

Earlier, he had taken the helm of the powerful Appropriations Committee, where he spent most of his Senate career attending to Hawaii. At the height of his power, Inouye routinely secured tens of millions of dollars annually for the state's roads, schools, national lands and military bases.

Although tremendously popular in his home state, Inouye actively avoided the national spotlight until he was thrust into it. He was the keynote speaker at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and later reluctantly joined the Senate's select committee on the Watergate scandal. The panel's investigation led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Inouye also served as chairman of the committee that investigated the Iran-Contra arms and money affair, which rocked Ronald Reagan's presidency.

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Historic first: Not one Dem elected to statewide office

(PNI) Sorting through the election debris:

The failure of Democrats Paul Newman and Sandra Kennedy to be re-elected to the Arizona Corporation Commission has been largely overlooked. In fact, it marks an extraordinary historic event.

As a result, in 2013, for the first time in Arizona history, there will not be a single Democrat holding a statewide elected office.

Since 1912, there has always been at least one Democrat elected to statewide office -- U.S. senator, governor, secretary of state, attorney general, superintendent of public instruction, mining inspector or corporation commissioner. As of January, after 100 years, there will be none.

This may come as a shock to some Democrats, who are being told that demographic trends in Arizona are improving their electoral fortunes. The principal demographic trend supposedly doing that is an increase in Latino voters.

According to the national exit poll, Latinos in Arizona were 18 percent of the electorate this year. They overwhelmingly voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, 74 percent to 25 percent. Yet, as of this writing, Romney was winning the state by 11 percentage points.

This isn't new. In 2010, the Latino vote also went overwhelming to the Democratic candidate for governor, Terry Goddard, over the Republican incumbent, Jan Brewer, 71 percent to 28 percent. Yet Brewer carried the state by 12 percentage points.

We've been inundated by press releases and news accounts about impressive efforts to register and turn out the Latino vote in Arizona. Yet Republican Jeff Flake will be Arizona's next U.S. senator and Joe Arpaio, who has been as much of a stimulus for Latino political activism as one human being could possibly be, was comfortably re-elected as sheriff.

The national situation may be different, although I suspect not nearly as much as the current hand-wringing assumes. But in Arizona, there is very little evidence that a surge in Latino voting is making the Democratic Party a more potent force.

In fact, just the opposite. The Democratic Party is a rapidly shrinking presence in Arizona politics.

Republicans have generally held steady in their voter-registration figures in the face of the true rising force in Arizona politics, the independent voter. Democrats have been hemorrhaging registrants.

For this presidential election, there were 69,000 fewer registered Democrats than there were in 2008. In 1998, Democrats had a registration advantage over Republicans in 12 of Arizona's 15 counties. Today, they have an advantage in just seven.

What leaves me dumbfounded is that Democratic leaders in Arizona seem completely unconcerned about this. They don't even acknowledge that the party has a problem that needs to be addressed.

If not having a single statewide elected Democrat for the first time in 100 years doesn't shake them out of their lethargy, probably nothing will.

The drop in Republican numbers in the Legislature is being taken as a sign of weakened electoral support. That's a misanalysis. Instead, it highlights how much Republicans overachieved in 2010.

In 2010, Republicans achieved a veto-proof Legislature, with 21 of 30 seats in the Senate and 40 of 60 seats in the House.

This turned out not to mean anything. There were not even any attempts to override a veto. When the governor is of your own party, things are worked out in different ways.

Having a veto-proof majority is highly unusual. In fact, since one-man, one-vote in the 1960s, it had never been achieved by either party in the Senate. It had happened only three times before in the House.

Republicans have a registration advantage in 17 of the 30 state legislative districts. So, the natural distribution of power is 17-13 in favor of Republicans in the Senate and 34 to 26 in the House.

It looks like that is exactly what the split will be in the Senate. No Senate candidate for either party successfully bucked a registration disadvantage.

There are still a lot of votes left to be counted, but at this writing, Republicans were leading for four House seats in which they have the registration disadvantage and Democrats in only one. In the House, Republicans will probably have 36 to 38 seats. That's outperforming their registration advantage and more seats than they had in either 2006 or 2008.

Perhaps I'm just deluding myself to keep from becoming too disillusioned with our democracy. But it seems to me that voters generally look past the clutter, garbage and crap the campaigns toss at them and decide elections on broad, important things.

In the presidential race, I think they did so again, but

on something that's missing from the national postelection analysis gabfest.

The exit poll suggests that Romney didn't make his case that he would be materially better on the economy or fixing the finances of the federal government than Barack Obama.

So, people were left with a lot of financial distress and anxiety in a sluggish economy with uncertain prospects.

Obama clearly stood for the proposition that government should be willing to help. Romney clearly stood for paring back what government does, except for the military.

Given the lack of belief that Romney would really improve the economy, swing voters didn't want to give up government as a source of potential help.

That and a potent ground game, I think, decided the election.

Copyright 2012 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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