I've enjoyed laughing at the pathetic VP choices the McCain campaign has tossed about as much as anyone. I would dearly love to see him pick someone like Jindal, Lieberman or Romney just because of of the hilarious commentary here, and because of how easy they are to mock. I truly can't see any one of them making a difference.
And I expect McCain will go with a safe predictable choice.
But for months I've had a niggling fear about one potential candidate, and how much of a challenge it would present to Obama's - to our - campaign. And in the last few days I've been feeling more and more strongly like it might happen.
Who is it?
Meg Whitman, most recently the CEO of Ebay.
From wikipedia
Margaret Cushing "Meg" Whitman[2] (born August 4, 1956)[3] was President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay from March 1998 to March 2008, when she stepped down from her role. She has been a director since March 1998, and continues to serve in that capacity. Ms. Whitman joined eBay when it was a small auction website with 30 employees and revenues of more than $4 million. According to Forbes magazine, Whitman was worth an estimated $1.4 billion in 2007.[1] She is one of only seven women to have been repeatedly ranked among the world's most influential people by Time magazine.[4]
Meg Whitman, Harvard MBA and self-made billionaire, with a ton of corporate experience. Female. Long marriage to a neurosurgeon, two teenage sons. She's personable, tough, and focused. She likes fly-fishing. Has political aspirations, and some say she stepped down in order to focus on a 2010 run for Governor of California. She's been a big Republican fundraiser, hosting an event at her home in the spring that raised $2.5m for McCain. She was at E-Bay for 10 years, during which time it had a remarkable run of growth which only began to lose some luster around the time she stepped down.
Meg Whitman would be a surprise pick, a shake-up to a doddering campaign that desperately needs some excitement. She could galvanize women and businesses, and would re-inforce McCain's maverick credentials.
Politico mentioned her back in June, in an article on Longshots in the VeepStakes. In the article they analyzed long-shot candidates for both parties, offering for the Republicans such names as Bill Gates, Eric Cantor, William Cohen, and Meg Whitman. For what she brings to the ticket, they cited her wealth, and her business success story, building eBay from a start up to the company it is today ("a worldwide brand that provides income to 1.3 million small entrepreneurs"). They contrast her success with the much higher negatives of Carly Fiorina.
The only downside they're able to come up with on Whitman is this:
The cloud in all that silver lining just might be Whitman's estimated $1.4 billion net worth, which is not necessarily the kind of number a candidate wants floating around during an economic downturn.
It's a negative, but somehow I doubt McCain will have a problem with it.
Interestingly to me, she seems to share much of Obama's worldview. One of the reasons she got hooked on eBay was how much it serves to connect people. She was interviewed by Fast Company a few years after she started, and, describing why she decided to leave PlaySkool (where she was Mr. Potato Head's boss) for what was then a black-and-white auction site, said
And then Pierre Omidyar, eBay's founder, said that people had met their best friends on eBay, had traveled with other eBay users. That people had connected over a shared area of interest. I said, This is huge.
She repeated this people-powered them in her exit interview a few months ago:
I would say that the best move was that Pierre’s idea was a really good idea: using the Web to empower regular people and small businesses to do commerce.
She seems inspired by the grassroots nature of her company, and if she translates that passion into politics (and is permitted by the McCain campaign to focus on that grassroots effort), she could present quite a challenge.
In fact, she only recently switched her public political affiliation to Republican. She used to work at Bain & Company, where she got to be friends with its CEO Mitt Romney and gradually became fascinated with politics. She was the finance co-chair for Romney's failled presidential bid. Here's a bit more information on her political fascination:
Last September, Whitman switched her party registration from "decline to state" to Republican, according to records in San Mateo County, where she lives. The source close to Whitman said she had made the change so she could vote for Romney in the Feb. 5 Republican primary, which is closed to independents this year.
"Whitman has the potential to be a very strong candidate," says former Republican consultant Dan Schnur. "She brings very strong private sector experience to the table, and her involvement in politics gives her a potential base of support as well."
Whitman could breathe life into a party that has little money and few stars beyond Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is often at odds with Republican doctrine.
Mark Ambinder suggests that she should try her hand at Secretary of the Treasury before running for California. As a side note, here's one of the very funny comments someone posted to Ambinder:
This is absolutely the truth, please believe me:
I went to college (Princeton '77) and business school (Harvard '79) with Meg. I even helped with tutoring her in our math class in business school.
Treasury Secretary? That has to be someones idea of a joke.
The odds on her being selected are probably not that great. If we go by the speaker schedule at the convention, she won't be selected, as she and Carly Fiorina are scheduled to speak on Wednesday Sept. 3, when the theme of the night is "Prosperity." I haven't been able to find out much about her positions. But at Saddleback, McCain mentioned her as one of the three wisest people he knows. He mentioned her and eBay's success again at a speech recently. It seems to me that he's started playing up her credentials just before announcing his pick. And I'm not the only one who's noticed, as a California website asks Did John McCain hint at his VP choice in Orange County?
We'll know tomorrow, and I've been sitting on these thoughts/fears for a while, so I figured I'd get them out there now. As I said, I doubt he'll take such a maverick pick, since her lack of political experience will hurt his argument that Obama is unqualified. But of all the potential picks out there, she's the one that worries me the most.