As hilarious as it sounded, it was a memorable line.

Remember when the late former secretary of state Madeleine Albright introduced trailing Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday in 2016?

Hillary Clinton ended up losing to Senator Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire. But Clinton would cinch the Democratic Party’s Nomination only to lose to Donald Trump.

Enter Vicky Cayetano a woman candidate for the 2022 Gubernatorial Primary in Hawaii. She faced relentless discrimination, unlike her male opponents.

By all indications, the 66-year-old Vicky Cayetano has led a remarkable, principled, and compassionate life with much to show for and contribute to Hawaii. An immigrant from The Philippines to Los Angeles to Honolulu, she and her family worked hard and succeeded.

Vicky was an single mother of two who started a successful laundry service business that eventually employed about 1,000 workers. She would meet Governor Ben Cayetano, married him on May 5, 1997 and become the First Lady of Hawaii.

At the age of 66, she felt the need to leave a legacy to help Hawaii get out of its doldrums. She self-financed her gubernatorial campaign with about $3 Million.

Just the ability to “walk the talk” by spending her own money should had caused voters to pause. To think that this was one candidate who was not beholden to massive corporate funding like her opponent Lt. Governor Josh Green was.

It didn’t matter that Vicky Cayetano was a serious and no-nonsense executive who had successfully ran a successful business for 32 years. Start-up entrepreneurs like Vicky Cayetano have innate and unique traits – imagination, can-do mindset, independent, and quick study. These traits are needed to prosper Hawaii.

Vicky Cayetano was not a career politician who had carefully mapped out her political ladder. Otherwise, we would seen a methodical and cultivated of social media presence or like posting photos of serving food to the homeless or the like.

However, she had a good record of genuine interest and compassion in helping Hawaii through her own unique ways like serving on business boards, forming a scholarship for college students or helping the Hawaii Humane Society with rescue animals or helping to save the 64-member Honolulu Symphony and so on.

Instead of looking into the great possibilities and capabilities of this authentic candidate, the opposition focus was on very superficial but persistent fallacies like:

“ Ben Cayetano is going to control her “. This was a insult to public intelligence and to an independent, intelligent and capable woman. It implies that a successful woman like Vicky Cayetano cannot be her own person with her own mind.

Ben Cayetano served as the fifth governor of the State of Hawaii from 1994 to 2002. That was a long time ago. Ben Cayetano had an independent and maverick record that include shaking the established BIG 5 and also the Bishop Estate Trust.

How unfortunate. The State of Hawaii missed a good opportunity to create a paradigm shift for the better. Vicky Cayetano has the credentials, skills, experience, mindset and compassion to lift Hawaii. But she was a woman whom a focused social media campaign painted as someone who would be a puppet of her husband or not qualified or capable of being a Governor.

The only woman Governor Hawaii had was Linda Lingle, a Republican.

What would the late Madeleine Albright say about this lost opportunity for Hawaii – this candidate who happened to be a woman?