1 week Ago
Modern campaign announcements are as annoying as the "preboarding process" of big airlines. You've probably heard the illogical directives from a crew member mumbling into a microphone. Certain passengers, such as those with small children, are told they can preboard, which actually means they can go aboard.
Airlines might have been inspired by the broadcasting business, where announcers mauled the language with redundancy: "This program," they would say, "was prerecorded at an earlier time." Candidates for public office have their own way of creating semantic messes. Instead of preboarding or prerecording, they offer pretense.
Former Las Cruces Mayor Ken Miyagishima told me he is running for governor. Then he said he probably will announce his candidacy the last week of May. A Democrat who is part Japanese, Miyagishima spoke of the potential for a historic matchup against a Republican.
"Wouldn't it be something if Judith Nakamura and me make it to the general election?" he said, alluding to the state's small Japanese population. Nakamura, a retired justice of the state Supreme Court, once described herself as "one-quarter Japanese and three-quarters Heinz 57." She said she is considering running for governor but has announced nothing.
Traditionalists and the Kraft Heinz Foods Co. applaud her style. The odds of Miyagishima winning the Democratic primary for governor seem almost as low as a campaign against Nakamura.
The reasons have nothing to do with ethnicity. Miyagishima has never run for a regional or statewide office, and few voters outside his home county know anything about him. He declined to go on the record about his ideas for improving the state.
"I can't tell you. We have our narrative," but it's not being discussed yet, he said. And so the pearls of his platform will dangle until his next announcement.
An insurance executive, Miyagishima had a long career in local politics. He ran in 14 elections and won 11. His races were for the Las Cruces City Council, Doña Ana County commissioner and mayor of Las Cruces.
His 16 consecutive years as mayor are a record in the city of 111,000. Miyagishima's experience might not count for much in a statewide election. Starting as an unknown makes the campaign trail rockier.
Howie Morales was a state senator from Silver City when he ran for governor in 2014. He carried six counties in Southern New Mexico but finished a distant fourth in the five-way Democratic primary. Few outside Morales' region supported him.
Morales, now in his second term as lieutenant governor, said he will announce by June whether he will run again for governor. He said his chances would be better this time, as he's been through three statewide primaries and two general elections. Another Democratic state senator, Joseph Cervantes of Las Cruces, fared worse than Morales in a 2018 bid for governor.
Cervantes lost his home county, as well the other 32 counties, on his way to a last-place showing in a field of three. The exception in recent times was Republican Susana Martinez, who was district attorney of Doña Ana County for 14 years. Everything broke just right for her in the 2010 governor's race.
Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson had become unpopular in his second and final term because of scandals and a bad economy. Voters were ready for a change.
Martinez easily defeated Richardson's lieutenant governor, Diane Denish. Martinez became the first Hispanic woman elected as a governor in U.S.
history. A dark chapter in history figured in Miyagishima becoming a resident of New Mexico. In the bigotry and hysteria after the Japanese Navy's attack on Pearl Harbor, his father and grandfather were herded to internment camps.
Both were U.S. citizens, but that did not matter in the early 1940s.
A government acting without due process forced Miyagishima's grandfather to sell his California-based fishing business in 48 hours before transporting him to an isolated camp. Ken's dad, Mike Miyagishima, was only 11 years old when war broke out. Mike would spend part of his youth in the internment camp in Poston, Ariz.
Miyagishima quoted his father as finding an upside to the loss of liberty: "It might have saved lives. A lot of people wanted to kill us." Miyagishima's father harbored no bitterness toward his government.
After the war, he joined the U.S. Air Force and served 20 years.
Ken was born in Biloxi, Miss., in 1963, but he would go West with the family. His dad was stationed in Alamogordo for a time before moving the family to Las Cruces in 1971.
Ken has lived there since. His challenge is to become recognizable to voters, especially in Albuquerque. At least a third of the votes will be cast in the state's population center, and the two announced Democratic gubernatorial candidates, Deb Haaland and Sam Bregman, are well-known in Albuquerque.
Miyagishima told me he can defeat them. He'll enter deep water when he gets around to his next announcement. To be seen is how well he can swim.
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