The internet’s eBay made Meg Whitman a billionaire. She now wants to see if unlimited spending can make her governor of California this November.
Whitman spent $90 million to win the Republican nomination. She has good reason to believe that money can buy her the governor’s mansion.
Whether it can will get a good test in the Sunshine State: Democrat Jerry Brown will not be able to match her, dollar for dollar.
Brown will have two things going for him: his vast experience with and knowledge of California government and the yet-to-be-weighed public reaction to the psychological overtones involved.
A certain number of California voters will vote for Brown as a vote against the influence of money in the state’s politics. They will, in other words, vote against Whitman because she is a billionaire: a billionaire willing, even eager, to spend lavishly to get elected. Those voters will be saying they won’t be bought — and resent the effort to buy them.
Another set will vote for her because she is a successful entrepreneur who lived the American dream in screaming technicolor. They will tell themselves that what California needs is a problem-solver, a proved administrator, a believer in the free enterprise system who could use her business know-how to deal with California’s huge debt and governmental dysfunction.
Her super-wealth proves to these voters that she’s the woman for the job.
THERE WILL BE other factors in the California contest, to be sure. Whitman will have whatever advantage there will be in running as a Republican with the Democratic party sinking in the polls. A first-time politician, her promise to be new and different is believable. The contrast between Whitman and Brown is as stark as can be.
And that contrast brings up another question California voters must ask themselves: How much does experience count? Meg Whitman knew how to run eBay. Jerry Brown knows how California’s government works and drank in California politics with his mother’s milk. His father, known as “Pat” Brown, also served as attorney general and then as governor.
Is the expertise learned in an Internet enterprise transferrable to the infinitely more complex challenge of governing the nation’s largest state? Or should Californians play it safe and put someone in the governor’s chair schooled to deal with governing?
Jerry Brown, after all, was elected governor of California in 1974 and again in 1978. During his regimes state taxes were reduced and the state ran up the largest budget surplus in its history. He has served as mayor of Oakland and is now the state’s attorney general.
What Jerry Brown did not do was get very rich.
One of every eight Americans is a Californian. All of us should watch this drama with deep interest.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
