Look, she's never been a beloved candidate. Even Meg Whitman's supporters have never really been able to get excited about her. For most of them she may simply be the only ideological game in town. The rest are likely more blinded by the endless array of ads bought with her personal fortune than they are dazzled with her promise as a leader. What's truly astonishing is that this woman is literally trying to purchase an election and the best she can get is layaway. Up against Jerry Brown, a septuagenarian fixture in California politics, she casts herself as the fresh face in this race and she's not only significantly behind him in the polls, but she actually comes across as the stodgy, self-entitled insider to his scrappy, fighter-for-the-people.
That was all before the remarkable events of the past two days. This is a woman who has campaigned heavily on getting tough with employers who hire undocumented workers and then yesterday, incredibly, we learn that she was one of them! She had an undocumented immigrant working in her house for nine years.
It's not like Meg Whitman's problems with hypocrisy are new. Since the beginning of her campaign, she's been forced to answer questions about the uncomfortable fact that when she casts a vote for herself in a few weeks it'll be the very first time she sets foot in a voting booth! She wants Californians to come to the polls on her behalf and yet she's never deigned to go and vote herself?
Whitman has an ad in which she says that other politicians don't realize how serious the unemployment situation is because "they don't see it every day." However, she declares, "I see it every day." Sure, Whitman sees unemployment every day. That's because she shipped 40% of eBay's jobs overseas! The California Labor Federation called her a "serial outsourcer."
I love California. I've been here for twenty years and I won't ever live anywhere else. The state is as vast as it is varied, but there is a common theme that this is a place where anything is possible. Even if you spend $120 million dollars of your own money, you can still lose.