Former eBay boss Meg Whitman
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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."