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...