Know Your Future Governator: Meg Whitman

Welcome to the Know Your Future Governator series. The five part series (for now) will cover the five candidates who have more or less thrown their hats into the ring for the California Governor’s race of 2010.

So far the candidates are:

For the Dems: Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown
For the Reps: Meg Whitman, Steve Poizner, and Tom Campbell

This week in Know Your Future Governator, meet Meg Whitman!

Most well-known as the former CEO of eBay, Ms. Whitman took the company from a 30 person start up to a major internet corporation with over 15,000 employees. Since her resignation in November 2007, she has been actively involved in the political arena.

As a former consultant of Bain & Company, Whitman supported former Bain & Company CEO Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2008 and was on his “National Finance Team”. After Romney left the race and endorsed Senator John McCain, Whitman followed suit and joined the McCain presidential campaign as a national co-chair, even giving a speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Check out her speech on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWuL_SgdQww

So where is Meg on the issues? Her three major platforms appear to be jobs, spending and education (I’d like to give her an air-five for at least making education a priority before I even start tearing anything apart).

Straight from the Meg Whitman for Governor website: http://www.megwhitman.com/index.php

On jobs: Ms. Whitman says that she will 1) Streamline the permitting and approval processes to make it easier for businesses to expand or locate in California 2) Eliminate inefficient and unnecessary regulations that increase business costs, decrease competitiveness and threaten California jobs and 3) Lower taxes to give businesses the incentive to invest, innovate, hire more workers and prosper

On spending: she promises to 1) Commit to at least $15 billion in savings and efficiencies within 4 years 2) End runaway spending by implementing a sustained government spending freeze 3) Reduce the size of government while making it more responsive and productive

On education: Meg claims that she can 1) Give students and parents more choice and control by expanding charter schools 2) Reward success by giving more pay to high-performing teachers 3) Make California’s schools the nation’s leaders in Math, Science and the other bedrock skills needed to succeed in the 21st century economy

This is all very well and good and everything, but sounds like politics as usual. Take a look back to Arnold’s victory speech when he won the special election against Gray Davis in 2003:

“I will not fail you. I will not disappoint you. And I will not let you down. For two months, I've been speaking out about the needs of bringing back fiscal responsibility to this state, bringing back the positive business atmosphere, bringing back businesses, bringing back jobs, and bringing back our education.”

And how has that worked out for us?

On the other hand, Meg Whitman has something the current governator was seriously lacking when he first took the job: managerial experience. She did amazing things for eBay and I have no doubt that Ms. Whitman could run our state government just as well as the next guy (or gal).

For now though, while there’s still some competition out there, I ask that she get specific.

HOW are you going to streamline the permitting and approval processes to make it easier for businesses to expand or locate in California? Which regulations will get cut to eliminate inefficient and unnecessary regulations that increase business costs, decrease competitiveness and threaten California jobs?

HOW will you reduce the size of government while making it more responsive and productive?

HOW will “success” be measured in order to reward teachers and increase their pay?

HOW can we make California’s schools the nation’s leaders in Math, Science and the other bedrock skills needed to succeed in the 21st century economy?