Democratic National Committee spokesman Damien LaVera said he didn't expect Whitman to make much of difference in drawing voters.
"John McCain has already admitted he doesn't understand the economy and has joined President Bush in championing policies that show how out of touch he is with the challenges facing working families," LaVera said in an e-mail. "No new fundraisers can change that."
Little is known about Whitman's political views; until recently she was registered as an independent.
She grew up in a Republican family on Long Island. But when she moved from New York to California in 1980, she said, "I had voted Republican most of the time, but I wasn't entirely sure -- and I thought 'You know what, let's just do decline-to-state.' "
She wasn't politically active until Romney called in late 2006, she said. She met McCain when he spoke to a group of EBay users she had accompanied to Washington to talk about small-business issues. The Arizona senator called Whitman seeking her help after Romney suspended his campaign.
Whitman lines up with McCain on many issues -- although she said she doesn't agree with his call for overturning the abortion rights decision Roe vs. Wade.
The economy "is perhaps the most significant issue that we face today," she said. After ticking off concerns -- inflation, $100-a-barrel oil, $4-a-gallon gas, the collapse of the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns -- Whitman said, "I feel quite strongly that it is important to elect a Republican."
Whitman said she and McCain share a philosophy of scaling back the role of government, a point of view partly shaped by her EBay experience. "The EBay model is very Republican in its essence -- it's about making a small number of rules and getting out of the way" while not "overtaxing the community," she said.
As the nation deals with a weakening economy and the mortgage foreclosure crisis, Whitman said she would work with McCain to press for making Bush's tax cuts permanent and reducing the corporate tax rate. When asked what could be done about the mortgage foreclosure crisis, she said she approved of "public-private partnerships to keep as many people in their homes as humanly possible."
"Some of this is simply going to have to take its course," she said.
In California, Whitman said she generally supports Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's philosophy of avoiding tax hikes to address the state's budget shortfall. "Tax increases should absolutely be the very last resort," she said. But Whitman said she had not examined the governor's proposals for across-the-board cuts closely enough offer an opinion.
She also demurred on immigration, saying she had "not dug in deep as to what the right thing to do is nationally, or for that matter in California."
McCain has centered his campaign on U.S military success in Iraq. Whitman, who said the 2003 invasion "probably was the right thing to do," supported the troop buildup in Iraq last year "because once you're in -- and we're in deep -- I do feel quite strongly we have to see if there's a way to win this."
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maeve.reston@latimes.com
