American Maggie

Meg Whitman is a refreshingly unlikely candidate rising up through the California GOP.  There has never been a woman Republican candidate elected to run for Governor in California; but she might just be the right candidate to not only win the primary, but also win the general election in 2010. Whitman has some positive characteristics that are lacking in the other gubernatorial candidates but there is no question she will have an uphill battle.  

The current voter registration is about 44% democratic to 33% republican with another 24% registered voters decline to state/other. The Democratic Party is also 58% female to 42% male and the GOP is 50%/50% male and female. 

According to 2008 exit polls, more than 54% of voters in California were women and 46% were men.  While 42% of voters were self identified Democrats, 30% were self identified Republicans and 28% were self identified Independents.

Moderate democratic women might be the answer to Meg Whitman’s success. Whitman will have a tough challenge of getting those Democratic women to cross party lines – she is a pro-choice and does not have nearly the name recognition as the Democrats in the race.  Whitman also believes in a small government, something that most Californians are not accustomed to.

However Whitman’s positives just might sway enough Democratic women to vote for her.  Meg Whitman has never run for office and she appears to have no baggage. Whitman is the only candidate in the field that has no scandal, no voting record and no previous gaffes that so often fuels the negative campaign ads and press. 

 Whitman also has a seemingly endless supply of money. She gave her campaign $15 million in the summer and has signaled she would spend nearly $150 million more if needed.  Whitman definitely leads the money race of the 5 candidates that are running or rumored to be running by nearly threefold.   In a state as large as California, money will be a critical aspect of the gubernatorial race in order to reach such a broad and expensive media markets.

Her personal story, effectively crafted as how it translates to her political positions, could be very compelling to voters.  She highlights the fact that she was a successful business executive for eBay and wants to fundamentally change the way California is run.  She wants to restore California to its grandeur it once was, but has failed to live up to because of lack of leadership.  Her experience and success as a business executive might appeal to women voters who are working hard to balance their checkbooks while their state goes on an out-of-control spending spree.  One of Whitman’s issues is rebuilding California’s education system from one of the worst in the nation.  With a budget that spends nearly half on education it appears coupled with her proven management skills, she might have just what it takes to accomplish that. On Whitman’s campaign website she states, “Restoring California will not be easy. It will take time to uproot old habits… old ways of thinking… and old ways of doing business. But do it we can, and do it we must, because we all love California too much to let it fail. ”

Whitman has not always fallen in line with the GOP; she opposed all of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget propositions, all of which failed in the end.  More Recently She has been getting a lot of flack for her recent comments supporting Van Jones, before Van Jones resigned. This is minor and she will likely move very quickly beyond this however it may help to lead the undecided voter to respect her independence from her party line.

If Meg Whitman keeps her campaign positive and on the message, she might have a real chance of attracting the moderate women of California and breaking the glass ceiling of California’s highest office.  

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Meghan Hays Goodman is a native of California and previously worked for Former Governor Gray Davis and currently works for a consulting firm in Washington, D.C.  Goodman self identifies as a Democrat.

In a world where deep, cultural insights are a dime a dozen, the left and the mainstream media haven’t left us disappointed. If anything, they have been having a field day in the wake of Joe Wilson’s outburst, offering bits and pieces of revolutionary wisdom whenever anyone would listen. From liberal bloggers to former presidents, to those on the op-ed pages, the theorizing has abounded, despite Wilson saying his outburst was simply “spontaneous.”

The esteemed Maureen Dowd of the New York Times is no exception, nor are the writers for the Huffington Post, or the liberal hosts of MSNBC. Particularly David Shuester, who during a recent segment, wondered if “institutional bigotry” was only present in certain parts of the country.

 “I’ve heard from so many people the fact that Joe Wilson is from South Carolina […] it strikes a lot of people as awfully close to the idea that maybe there was some sort of racist or bigoted element there,” said Shuester. I think the evidence is so overwhelming that there is an effort out there to demonize the first African-American president.”

But unfortunately for her, Ms. Dowd takes the cake when it comes to nonsensical accusations and non-sequitors. In her first column about Joe Wilson’s outburst, Dowd said “…Joe Wilson yelled ‘You lie!’ at a president who didn’t. But fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: ‘You lie, boy!’ […] Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”

A few days later after Wilson was formally rebuked by the House, Dowd opined, “It was a rare triumph for civility in a country that seems to have lost all sense of it […] the standards of behavior in this new country are terrible.”

And so, in a classic example of pseudo-intelligence in the form of an op-ed, because Ms. Dowd imagined Wilson saying the word “boy,” the Congressman from South Carolina is racist. One could then assume that Ms. Dowd believes that anyone who is opposed to Obama’s policy is a racist.

It seems like ancient history now, but remember back in the 2008 election cycle when the biggest question in the newspapers and primetime news shows was whether or not the country was ready for a black president? Many in the media responded to that question with a resounding “Yes we can embrace, (and maybe even fawn over), an African-American president!”

Yet as Ms. Dowd demonstrates, perhaps it’s not the general American populace that isn’t ready for a black president. Rather, it is the liberal media, who have been consumed with questions about Obama’s race since he became a major contender in 2008. And unfortunately, those initial questions have spawned into all out racism paranoia.

But as is usually the case, this paranoia reveals more about those expressing it, than it does about those accused. By jumping to racism every time conservatives speak out against Obama, the left has only proven that they were never ready to look beyond race. Race should be a non-issue, and to the majority of conservatives, it is. But those on the left won’t let it go.

Not once during the past year has a Republican Congressman or other leader expressed dislike for the president simply because he happens to be African-American. Nor has some massive uprising of bigotry and racial hatred in middle-America been making headlines lately. Pointing to a few signs or even an over-zealous host on Fox News doesn’t prove the right has racist feelings toward Barack Obama.

This racism suspicion is a product of a mainstream media that became so preoccupied with the candidate Barack Obama, that they began to question the integrity of his opposition. Meanwhile, real journalistic pursuits were being ignored, and it took two twenty-something amateurs to uncover the truth about ACORN.

The truth is the fierce outcry over President Obama’s plan for healthcare is simply that: a fierce outcry about nationalized healthcare. Nothing more. Ms. Dowd and her like-minded colleagues are welcome to disagree, but disagreement means nothing without proof. And they have none. Note to those Yankees up at the New York Times and MSNBC: being from South Carolina is not sufficient proof that someone is a racist.

As far as Dowd’s assertion that the “standards of behavior in this new country are terrible,” what is democracy without a little (or a lot) of raucous debate and dissent every now and again, especially when the issue at hand concerns nationalizing a major sector of the economy?

Yet Dowd and friends seem more concerned with civility and acceptable behavior than healthy dissent. And this, coming from someone who accused a U.S. Congressman of being racist based on well, nothing. 

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Amanda Carey is the Editor of The Tiger Town Observer at Clemson University.  She has previously worked for Robert Novak and has been published in Reason Magazine and The American Spectator.