I may be projecting a bit here, but I wonder if a certain desperation among the electorate won't be Meg Whitman's biggest advantage in the forthcoming race for governor of California.
We've tried professional politicians (Pete Wilson, Gray Davis). We've tried a Hollywood action star and a melodrama second banana (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ronald Reagan). We've tried a colorless nobody (George Deukmejian) and a publicity magnet (Jerry Brown). And after all that, here we are, bankrupt and uncertain, saddled with another state budget that everyone knows is really a fraud, next year's problem masquerading as this year's solution.
Is it time to hand the statehouse over to a corporate CEO?
Whitman, who retired last March after 10 years running EBay, believes her experience makes her "uniquely qualified to be the chief executive officer of California in these economic times," as she told me last week, shortly after announcing her candidacy for the GOP nomination for governor.
"I managed and led very large and complex organizations," she said. (Before EBay, she held executive positions at Hasbro, FTD and the investment consultancy Bain & Co.) "I balanced the budget throughout my entire career. I have prioritized projects and made trade-offs. This is something that the state is going to have to learn how to do."
Whitman certainly has an impressive record. She pulled off perhaps the hardest feat of entrepreneurship -- building a new business model almost from scratch. When she joined EBay in early 1998, it was an online service for hobbyists, with fewer than 50 employees, 300,000 users and $4 million in revenue. When she retired it employed 15,000, brought in $8 billion a year, and with 246 million regular users reigned as the dominant auction marketplace on the Web.
Whitman imposed MBA-style order on EBay's nerdly culture, led it to a spectacular initial public offering only a few months after joining, and managed it through growing pains involving such issues as how to beat online fraud, whether to allow the sale of guns and ammo (answer: no), and how to meet competition from Yahoo and Amazon.
Yet there's reason to wonder whether she can overcome the lesson of history, which tells us that it's very hard for a successful CEO to morph into a successful politician.
