Word: megged
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There are several clever mantras that Meg Whitman chants while she's campaigning to be the next governor of California: "Don't try to boil the ocean" (taking too broad of an agenda to Sacramento), "All roads lead to Florida" (a model of how to fix the education system), "I am not 'kumbaya' about this" (she understands the difficulty of being governor) and, finally, the kind of oversimplified sound bite that is especially maddening to her critics, "You've got to find 20% of the reforms that will get you 80% of the way home...
...tell you about my mother," she said, not for the first time that week. She talked about Margaret Whitman Sr.'s daring service as an airplane and truck mechanic for the Red Cross in New Guinea during World War II and how it motivated the younger Meg. She rattled off her own accomplishments - college at Princeton followed by Harvard Business School, her move to San Francisco with her neurosurgeon husband, her transformation of eBay from a midsize start-up into a high-tech powerhouse while raising two boys, her postretirement role as an adviser to Mitt Romney and later Senator...
...also faces scrutiny because of her wealth, which is estimated to be more than $1 billion. "There's a history of wealthy Californians trying to start at the top, 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...
Whitman's greatest obstacle may be convincing voters that she actually knows what she's talking about - and there she has a ways to go. "Primary voters are very intrigued by the concept of Meg Whitman," says Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. "Her challenge over the next months is going to be to replace that concept with something more tangible...
...year is an eternity in politics, and Meg Whitman is prepared to spend what it takes. "We are running this campaign to win," she says. Californians 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...