Word: sacramento
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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...
...Road to SacramentoThe 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...
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...
...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...
...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...