Will the Real Meg Whitman Please Stand Up?

Original Link: http://trueslant.com/saralibby/2009/12/21/will-the-real-meg-whitman-please-stand-up/

California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman is a tough nut to crack. A recent survey shows at least half of likely voters don’t know enough about the former eBay CEO to have an opinion about her, or haven’t heard of her. When it comes to women, the survey found that Whitman has made even less of an impression: 68 percent are unable to give an opinion of Whitman — the only woman in the race.

Even the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal had a hard time gleaning anything revealing for a profile of her, admitting that her stump speeches have a cold, board room feel and that when she’s on stage, “You can almost picture the PowerPoint slides.” A winking, folksy hockey mom she is not.

And it’s already been widely reported that Whitman’s voting record doesn’t provide any details about her priorities because – oops! – she didn’t even register to vote until 2002, despite being eligible since the 1970s.

That people knows little about her would likely be frustrating to a candidate who has spent months on the campaign trail. But when one considers the two big Whitman stories to emerge this past week, perhaps she should be counting her blessings that she remains a mystery to most voters.

First, the gossip Web site Gawker caught wind of some horrifying behavior by Whitman’s two college-age sons, Griff and Will Harsh. Between the two of them, the pair has been kicked out of elite prep schools, as well as the dorms and a private eating club at Princeton – where their mom is not just an alumna, but one of its most generous all-time donors (the $30 million Whitman College is on the list of residential complexes Griff was allegedly banned from). Worse yet are rumors that Will, as one might expect for a poster child of white entitlement, is fond of tossing around the n-word.

Taken alone, I’m not sure how much weight these admittedly sketchy stories about Whitman’s sons should carry. She hasn’t used her sons as political props the way Sarah Palin frequently did with her children. But when you make education a cornerstone of your campaign, and stand to take the helm of a once world-class higher education system that is being forced to shut out more and more deserving students because of tuition hikes, it does not bode well for you that your own offspring have made such a mockery of the opportunities handed to them.

When combined with the picture now being painted of Whitman in a Delaware courtroom, things get even worse. Whitman is banking her entire campaign on the notion that she can run California as effectively as she ran eBay. But Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has testified as part of an ongoing civil case that eBay official Garret Price warned him about the “evil” Meg, who would reveal herself if Buckmaster and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark didn’t “g[et] with the program” and sell a minority stake in their site to eBay.

The Whitman team – and Price himself – deny the remark, but Newmark and Buckmaster have stuck to their story about the “two Meg Whitmans.” Any truth to their version of Whitman would certainly conflict with the carefully crafted image of her – that has yet to catch on – as a disciplined, generous woman who loves bass fishing and who adorns her Web site with poppy flowers. Could it be that her handlers have yet to let her show more substantial glimpses of personality because they’re afraid of what she’ll unleash?