It all seemed to be setting up so nicely for former eBay CEO Meg Whitman. When approaching the Republican Primary for Governor of California to succeed the star-crossed incumbent, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Whitman had three incredibly key things going for her.
- There was no logical successor waiting in the wings.
- She, from her high-profile connectivity to the McCain campaign, was commanding the most media attention in the race.
- Given her wealth and connections, she had racked up an impressive list of GOP endorsers, including former Governor Pete Wilson, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.
That she was unlikely to be outspent, even by wealthy state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, was an added bonus.
Her inevitability, though, took quite a solid beating this past week.
Often, voters are treated to stories in the course of the campaign cycle that offer the revelation that a candidate missed an election here or there, remiss in their duty as citizens. Usually, no big deal. After all, most voters themselves can remember a primary election that they sat out six years ago.
The problem for Meg Whitman, however, is that when it comes to shirking her civic duty, she decided to really set herself apart:
At the unofficial kickoff Saturday of the 2010 Republican primary campaign for governor, former eBay CEO and political neophyte Meg Whitman struggled to explain her abysmal voting record.
A year ago, The Chronicle reported that Whitman, 53, had not registered as a Republican in California until 2007 and had a spotty voting history for several years in the state before that. Last week, a Sacramento Bee investigation found no evidence of Whitman's voting before 2002 in several other states where she lived previously.
So, the woman who wants to run for Governor of the largest state in the Union may well have abstained from even voting at all, at least until she was in her mid-40s.
The second problem for Whitman is that the Teabagger hijacking of the Republican Party is really going to play hell with her chances to weather a general election.
Of course, the old mantra dating back since the Progressives threw the primary election into the mix was simple: tack to the base for the primary, tack back towards the middle in the general election.
That's going to prove to take deft footwork for Whitman (or any in the GOP field, for that matter). The amount of real estate between where the base of the GOP ideologically live and breathe right now and the "mainstream" of the California electorate has never been wider. And she starts from a position of extreme weakness:
Two Republican statewide candidates in California are touting the results of a state GOP convention straw poll that showed conservative activists overwhelmingly rejecting the gubernatorial bid of former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and the likely Senate bid of former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.
The campaign of gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner boasted about his 64-point victory over Whitman in Sunday's straw poll on their Web site and on Twitter.
While the straw poll had innate flaws (it was put on by right-wing Senate candidate Chuck DeVore, and the ballot box was in his hospitality suite), it did take into account the opinion of roughly half of the people attending the state GOP convention. And it underscores a particular problem for Whitman. To the GOP base, she is a relative unknown. She is known best for her connectivity to McCain--boffo for media coverage, but not such a swell way to introduce yourself to California's right-wing base. She has no political record with which to sell herself to these voters.
Therefore, in order to win the primary, she is going to have to go nuclear with her pronouncements of fealty to the right-wing of the Republican Party, in order to win over a base that is, at this early stage, extremely skeptical of her.
If she isn't successful in doing so, she won't make it out of the GOP primaries next Spring. But if she is successful, it is hard to imagine her being anything other than politically toxic in a state where the GOP got just 37% of the vote in last November's presidential election, and where Republicans currently hold just 44 of the state's 120 seats in the state legislature.