Word: whitmans
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...Road to SacramentoThe downside of Whitman's trial-by-fire learning process became obvious when she confronted the first major hiccup of her campaign. The Sacramento Bee reported in late September that Whitman had barely voted during her adult life and questioned whether she had registered as a Republican at all before 2007. The story quickly swirled into a scandal, and during a heated press conference, Whitman floundered as she tried to sidestep the questions, a beginner's mistake in a statewide race...
...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...
...Lately, Whitman's wealth hasn't been as controversial as the way she is spending it. So far, she has injected $19 million of her money into a campaign that could end up costing $50 million or more. (She has raised more than $7 million.) She has alarmed longtime GOP hands in the state by burning through her funds at a frightening pace, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly on strategic advisers, pollsters, fundraising experts and a social-networking start-up called Tokoni, founded by former eBay and Skype executives, which is managing her online presence...
...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...
...Whitman's relationship with the press has been strained - some might say tortured - thus far. She is known for taking only a handful of queries after campaign events before being whisked away, and her press handlers aren't shy about interrupting her conversations with journalists. Her opponents scream about the fact that she won't debate them; they have already faced off four times, while Whitman has committed to just one debate in March. "She's clearly one of those people who likes to study and study an issue, really have an in-depth comfort zone with something, and then...