Is California Sold on Governor Meg Whitman?

There are several clever mantras that Meg Whitman chants while she’s campaigning to be the next governor of California: “Don’t try to boil the ocean” (taking too broad of an agenda to Sacramento), “All roads lead to Florida” (a model of how to fix the education system), “I am not ‘kumbaya’ about this” (she understands the difficulty of being governor) and, finally, the kind of oversimplified sound bite that is especially maddening to her critics, “You’ve got to find 20% of the reforms that will get you 80% of the way home.”

One afternoon in late October, Whitman, 53, was pulling all the jingles out, like clubs from a golf bag. It was the sort of performance that the former CEO of eBay — and newcomer to the whirlpool known as electoral politics — has become almost slick at delivering. She was standing on a platform, microphone in hand, at the edge of a beautiful garden in the wealthy desert enclave of Rancho Mirage, a town described as a “hotbed of GOP cash” by an attendee. She is no longer the frumpy corporate mascot who was once photographed in a beige turtleneck and high-waisted slacks, surrounded by a team of Silicon Valley executives. The new Whitman wears a lean, dark suit with a camisole peeking tastefully out and stylish heels, her face dusted with a California glow.

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“Let me tell you about my mother,” she said, not for the first time that week. She talked about Margaret Whitman Sr.’s daring service as an airplane and truck mechanic for the Red Cross in New Guinea during World War II and how it motivated the younger Meg. She rattled off her own accomplishments — college at Princeton followed by Harvard Business School, her move to San Francisco with her neurosurgeon husband, her transformation of eBay from a midsize start-up into a high-tech powerhouse while raising two boys, her postretirement role as an adviser to Mitt Romney and later Senator John McCain during his presidential campaign. “They inspired me to think beyond a career in business,” Whitman said.

Most of the questions at the end were fairly standard for a conservative Southern California crowd. “Can you talk about the unions and their stranglehold on Sacramento?” asked a woman in the audience. A second woman asked Whitman about the threat of pregnant illegal immigrants who cross the border to win citizenship for their newborns. Then a third woman piped in, rather timidly, asking, “How can we keep religious radicals out of our party? I think that’s why they’ve lost a lot of votes, with the opposition of gay inclusion or opposing women’s choice.”

Whitman paused, almost as if it were the first time that day that she had to think about her answer. “I am happy to tell people where I stand on the social issues, but I think, as Republicans and Californians, we have to lead with the things that will make the most difference in the near term,” she said. “I don’t want to exclude anyone from the party. I don’t want to exclude anyone from my campaign. I want everyone to be a part of this. But let’s rally around what we can mostly agree on.”

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Spine of Steel
Against a backdrop of a crippling statewide financial crisis and a national Republican Party civil war, Whitman is attempting her greatest balancing act yet: running for governor of the country’s most populous state as a fiscally conservative, socially moderate woman. As an accomplished business executive, she claims she is in the best position to create jobs and control spending in California, while playing down her pro-choice, socially moderate views. But at a time when GOP elements are conducting a witch hunt to purge moderates from the party, she may have to pass ideological litmus tests in order to get the Republican nomination.

Then there is the matter of carving out an identity as a female candidate, a tricky proposition when Sarah Palin, for all her flaws, is the rock star of the party. Whitman is fashioning herself as sort of anti-Palin. Whereas Palin can be catty, superficial and outrageous, Whitman is wonky and almost humorless, as if too many consultants (she has about two dozen) have massaged and smoothed over her imperfections so effectively that she’s as brittle and shiny as a Christmas tree ornament. She presents herself as a pragmatist who doesn’t much care about tightening gun-control laws or limiting a woman’s right to choose. She tries to project a muscular toughness, as Hillary Clinton did, with plans to fire 40,000 state employees and constant talk about her “spine of steel.” “Sarah Palin almost ruined it for women,” says Bruce Cain, executive director of the University of California Washington Center. “But Hillary Clinton did wonders. If you want to run, you want to be like Hillary. You want to know your stuff cold.”

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That’s particularly true in California, a state in almost perpetual crisis — it’s “effectively bankrupt,” as Whitman likes to put it — with a budget deficit befitting Argentina and crises with water, highways, prisons, schools, immigration and unemployment. The legislature and the governor are openly hostile to each other, and the electorate is disgusted with both of them. (Their approval ratings are 18% and 28%, respectively.) This state of affairs is alternately described as the end of civilization or America’s bright future, depending on whom you ask. Driving around the state, you’d never know that California was on the brink of apocalypse: the sun is shining and the lawns are bright green, even in the desert, so it’s as tempting to believe the optimists as it is the hysterics.

Over coffee before a speech in a San Diego hotel, Whitman ticks through her plans. “Let’s try to get a few things done at 100%, as opposed to trying to solve every problem,” she says. To that end, she proposes three ideas: creating jobs by slashing taxes and regulation; improving the education system by grading schools and launching more charter schools; and reducing government spending, primarily by firing thousands of state workers. (She won’t say which ones.) And — surprise — she intends to reap big savings from the state budget by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” through the introduction of more technology to the statehouse. Then that “spine of steel” comes up again. “If you have a huge need to be liked, if you have a huge need to be popular, I think in the near term this is a very bad job for you,” she says.

Whitman offers some commonsense ideas that few people could take issue with — but the way she talks about them makes it all sound just a little too easy, as if she thinks she’ll be able to breeze into Sacramento and simply decree that the government be run more efficiently. This last point seems to particularly irk members of the political chattering classes, some of whom groan or sigh when you mention Whitman’s name.

She also faces scrutiny because of her wealth, which is estimated to be more than $1 billion. “There’s a history of wealthy Californians trying to start at the top, like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, without having paid their dues,” says Lew Uhler, president of the National Tax Limitation Committee, an antitax group, who is supporting one of Whitman’s opponents. It takes a vast amount of money to be competitive in California, but the road to Sacramento is littered with the bodies of failed parvenus: Michael Huffington, the former Republican Congressman and ex-husband of Arianna, blew $28 million on a failed Senate bid in 1994; Al Checchi, a former co-chairman of Northwest Airlines, spent $40 million losing to Gray Davis in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1998; and the businessman Bill Simon, who campaigned unsuccessfully against Davis in 2002. All of them were seen as overconfident and underprepared, liable to self-destruct when pressed on basic policy questions. Raphael Sonenshein, a political-science professor at California State University at Fullerton, notes that self-made, first-time candidates often imagine incorrectly that politics can be made as efficient, orderly and logical as business. “While [very wealthy candidates] are usually competitive, it’s not nearly as easy as they think it’s going to be,” he says. “There’s a reason that politics is a profession.”

Lately, Whitman’s wealth hasn’t been as controversial as the way she is spending it. So far, she has injected $19 million of her money into a campaign that could end up costing $50 million or more. (She has raised more than $7 million.) She has alarmed longtime GOP hands in the state by burning through her funds at a frightening pace, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly on strategic advisers, pollsters, fundraising experts and a social-networking start-up called Tokoni, founded by former eBay and Skype executives, which is managing her online presence.

Whitman’s greatest obstacle may be convincing voters that she actually knows what she’s talking about — and there she has a ways to go. “Primary voters are very intrigued by the concept of Meg Whitman,” says Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. “Her challenge over the next months is going to be to replace that concept with something more tangible.”

Whitman’s relationship with the press has been strained — some might say tortured — thus far. She is known for taking only a handful of queries after campaign events before being whisked away, and her press handlers aren’t shy about interrupting her conversations with journalists. Her opponents scream about the fact that she won’t debate them; they have already faced off four times, while Whitman has committed to just one debate in March. “She’s clearly one of those people who likes to study and study an issue, really have an in-depth comfort zone with something, and then move forward,” says Jon Fleischman, a vice chairman, south, of the California Republican Party who characterizes Whitman as “a little bit awkward” when interacting with the media. “It’s O.K. to do that in business, but politics tends to be more spontaneous.”

The Road to Sacramento
The downside of Whitman’s trial-by-fire learning process became obvious when she confronted the first major hiccup of her campaign. The Sacramento Bee reported in late September that Whitman had barely voted during her adult life and questioned whether she had registered as a Republican at all before 2007. The story quickly swirled into a scandal, and during a heated press conference, Whitman floundered as she tried to sidestep the questions, a beginner’s mistake in a statewide race:

“What I’ve said is, There is no excuse for my voting record,” Whitman repeated over and over, like a highly coached robot. “Leaders need to stand up and acknowledge their mistakes.”

“Did you ever register as a Republican before 2007?” asked a reporter.

“So what I have said is that I did not vote as often as I should …”

“But the question is why?”

“What I have said is, It was not the right thing to do.”

“But why?” came a torrent of shouts. “Why can’t you answer the question?”

Whitman later said she was “focused on raising a family” as well as “on my husband’s career” by way of explanation of her spotty record, even as it trickled out that her voting history was slightly better than initially depicted. Not surprisingly, the “working mother” excuse sent feminists into a tizzy and created doubts for some of Whitman’s base of Republican women. “I raised a family and ran a business and still managed to vote,” sniffed Elaine Henderson, who went to hear Whitman speak in Rancho Mirage. “I’m just not happy with her explanation. I’d like the truth. If she wasn’t interested in politics, that’s O.K.”

And yet Whitman could still overcome both ideology and history to win. Her opponents for the GOP nomination, former Congressman Tom Campbell and state insurance commissioner Steve Poizner, throw her strengths and weaknesses into stark relief. Campbell is the kindly, well-versed uncle in the race and probably the most qualified candidate for the job. If Hollywood was casting for a man to play a governor in a movie, it would tap someone more like Campbell — with a moderate bent, a conservative suit and five terms in Congress representing Silicon Valley districts — than Arnold Schwarzenegger. When asked what distinguishes him from Whitman, Campbell says, “Experience. Government experience.” But there is one other big difference: he doesn’t have a lot of money to spend in the most politically expensive state in the U.S.

Poizner, founder of a company that produced the technology to put GPS in cell phones, which he sold for a reported $1 billion, is a confrontational spark plug who seems obsessed with Whitman. “Voters should choose her if they want someone to rebrand the state, and me if they want someone to rebuild it,” he likes to say. He is offering his own plan to cut taxes and is presenting himself as the true conservative in the race (although he, like Whitman and Campbell, is socially moderate). If Whitman prevails in the June primary, she will probably face former Democratic governor Jerry Brown next November. Polls show that if the election were held today, Brown would defeat the GOP nominee soundly.

But a year is an eternity in politics, and Meg Whitman is prepared to spend what it takes. “We are running this campaign to win,” she says. Californians have a history of taking chances at the polls, electing celebrity governors without any government experience. While it’s clear that, under the right circumstances, such candidates can win, they can have a harder time governing. As Whitman may soon learn, even if aphorisms can pave the way to Sacramento, it will take more than platitudes to succeed there.

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