She may have bet wrong on the presidential sweepstakes, but former eBay CEO Meg Whitman has a number of things going for her as a California gubernatorial candidate.
For starters, there’s her personal wealth, estimated at $1.4 billion by Forbes, and her reputation as a canny manager who guided a fledgling eBay from 20 employees in 1998 to a multibillion-dollar company.
Rest assured she is already using her money and connections, not to mention a few political chits earned over the last year, to bring on board some savvy political hands: Former California Gov. Pete Wilson has signed on as her campaign chairman, which will help shore up her support among traditional Republicans.
Jeff Randle, a player in the last four victorious Republican gubernatorial campaigns in California, including those of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Wilson, is a senior adviser, along with Henry Gomez, one of her closest advisors at eBay.
Whitman, 52, jumped into the political scene only about a year ago, first as California finance co-chair for Mitt Romney, and then as national co-chair for Republican nominee John McCain’s presidential campaign.
(McCain returned the favor by floating her name as a possible secretary of the Treasury during a presidential debate.)
Still, she has never run for office and drew criticism last fall after reports that she hadn’t voted in more than half of the state’s most important elections since 2002, including the historic recall election of former Gov. Gray Davis.
“I know it’s no excuse, but for years, she was heads down in her business and her family,” Gomez said.
A mother of two as well as a successful businesswoman, Whitman had successful stints at several companies before taking over at eBay, including Procter & Gamble and Hasbro.
Born on Aug. 4, 1956 in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, Whitman went to Princeton, aspiring to be a physician before switching her major to economics, and then earning an MBA from Harvard.
Her first job was with Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati where she married Griffith Harsh IV, a neurosurgeon and with whom she had two children. Later, she worked for Bain & Co., the management consulting firm once headed by Mitt Romney, and Stride Rite, the children’s shoe maker where she helped revive the Keds line.
After a stint at FTD, she became head of Hasbro’s Playskool and Mr. Potato Head divisions, where she was approached by a headhunter about joining a new online company called Auction Web.
She was initially dubious about its prospects, but reportedly became impressed with the prospects of online buying. When she took over eBay in 1998, the company had 20 employees, sales of $195 million and a customer base of 750,000, according to the Los Angeles Times.
With Whitman encouraging business to sell online, she boosted the customer base to 7 million within a year.
Still, navigating the shoals of politics, as opposed to corporate boardrooms is a different skill set. And as the third Republican to announce for governor, Whitman enters an already- crowded field, joining state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, who like Whitman is a multimillionaire with a strong business background, and former Congressman Tom Campbell, now a professor of business administration at the University of California at Berkeley.
Democrats are also expected to field several high-profile candidates of their own, including state Attorney General Jerry Brown, who was governor from 1975 to 1983.
Self-funded candidates have a decidedly mixed record in California politics with Al Checchi dropping nearly $40 million on an unsuccessful primary bid against fellow Democrat Gray Davis in the June 1998 primary.
At the very least, this race is likely to top that one as one of the most expensive in the state’s history.
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1 Comments
#1. Pierre 02.11.2009
Whitman and her chosen successor and former Bain colleague John Donahoe have seriously, perhpas mortally injured ebay with their Bain management consultant nonsense. Every California small business owner and every California voter should talk to a few ebay sellers to find out just how incompetent she is.
Anyone but Whitman.
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