Yesterday California Republicans turned to two very similar
candidates when they fielded their nominees for governor and U.S.
Senate. Both former CEOs. Both women. Both the preferred
candidates of the GOP establishment who had to convince skeptical
conservatives they were at least conservative enough.
On the same night that the Los Angeles Lakers clinched Game 3 of
the NBA Finals in Boston, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman won the
right to stand against career Democratic politician Jerry Brown’s
attempt to return to the governorship. Former Hewlett Packard CEO
Carly Fiorina was the GOP’s choice to run against screechy
liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer.
Whitman nearly stumbled when she said she would have vetoed a law
similar to Arizona’s SB 1070, a get-tough approach to illegal
immigration. Immigration powered Pete Wilson’s improbable Golden
State comeback in 1994 and seems to have rescued Arizona Gov. Jan
Brewer’s re-election bid this year. So California Insurance
Commissioner Steve Poizner sensed an opening and pounced.
But Whitman neutralized the issue when she deftly embraced the
general principles of the enforcement-first position on illegal
immigration without endorsing the specifics of the controversial
Arizona law. She vowed to be “tough as nails” on illegal
immigration and emphasized her opposition to amnesty. Poizner’s
own conservative credentials were somewhat ambiguous and he was
never able to get clearly to the right of Whitman, the
free-spending GOP frontrunner.
Whitman spent $81 million of her own money to win the Republican
nomination and has pledged to spend “whatever it takes” to beat
Brown in November. Poizner spent $25 million of his own money in
a primary that ended up being the most expensive election in
state history.
Carly Fiorina took a somewhat different path to the Republican
senatorial nomination. Early on, it looked like she might be
caught up in the nationwide insurgency against establishment
candidates, fitting into the Tea Party versus the National
Republican Senatorial Committee narrative. But two factors
intervened to save her from this fate.
The first was that Chuck DeVore, the Republican state assemblyman
running to Fiorina’s right, proved to be a strong conservative
but a weak candidate. He struggled to raise money and his
somewhat thin-skinned persona did not endear him to voters. Then
an even bigger gift came in the form of Tom Campbell, a former
congressman who abandoned the gubernatorial race to run for
Senate.
Campbell once fancied himself as something of a libertarian, but
he increasingly became a liberal Republican over the years. He
had a history of supporting tax increases, was pro-choice and
stridently hostile to social conservatives, and his efforts at
Muslim outreach a decade ago led to charges that he was soft on
terror and insufficiently supportive of Israel.
Fiorina was then able to obscure her differences with DeVore and
run to the right of Campbell. She campaigned as a pro-life,
fiscally conservative, hawkish candidate and while some of her
positions were vague — giving herself wiggle room to move back
to the center after winning the primary — they were solid enough
compared to Campbell’s record. Fiorina became the viable
conservative in the race and ended up winning big.
Will it matter come November? That much remains to be seen. The
polling suggests that both elections will be competitive — and
that Californians despise
their politicians, incumbent and challenger alike. It is the most
favorable political climate for Republicans since 1994, but even
then the GOP came up short in a tight Senate race.
DeVore contemptuously referred to Fiorina as a “rich dilettante”
during the primary campaign. Both Republican women will be
vulnerable to such charges in the general. Whitman is running
against a Democrat who knows how to play the populist card.
Fiorina will face an incumbent senator who is always vulnerable
but never beaten.
Both Whitman and Fiorina will be called upon to defend their
business records. Hewlett Packard fired Fiorina; in 2002,
congressional investigators accused Whitman of giving Goldman
Sachs a sweetheart deal when she hired the unpopular firm to
handle eBay’s banking business. Neither Wall Street nor
Washington are admired by Californians. The Democrats have a huge
registration advantage, but a 12.6 unemployment rate makes the
status quo untenable. Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is
much less popular than Democratic President Barack Obama.
When Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein ran for the Senate in
1992, pundits dubbed them “Thelma and Louise.” Political
columnist Lou Cannon says that Whitman and Fiorina are the
Republicans’ Thelma and Louise. We’ll see which Thelma and Louise
they emulate. Boxer and Feinstein both won their elections. But
in the movie, Thelma and Louise both ended up driving off a
cliff.
