Wealthy women lead Republican charge in California (Feature)

By Andy Goldberg Oct 1, 2010, 4:03 GMT

San Francisco - She's one of the richest women in California, and now she wants to be one of the most powerful, too.

Meg Whitman, chief executive who spent 10 years guiding eBay from a tiny web pioneer to the biggest auction site on the internet, has spent a record 119 million dollars of her 1.3-billion-dollar fortune in a bid to succeed Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

She is not the only former businesswoman hoping to cash in on the current American disenchantment with all things Democrat.

Carly Fiorina, the high-profile former chief executive of Hewlett Packard, also has her hat in the ring, hoping to defeat three-time Democrat incumbent Barbara Boxer to become California's junior senator.

Billionaire politicians are nothing new in American politics, despite the unsavoury appearance that they may give of using their money to buy power. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a media tycoon, is probably the most famous example in recent years, but most self- funded candidates fail to win election, according to a recent study by the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Then again, most of those candidates weren't women running as business-savvy outsiders in the middle of an economic downturn pledging to bring change to an electorate deeply disenchanted with the male-dominated status quo. Whitman claims that her wealth insulates her from outside pressures and that her opponent is a business-as-usual politician beholden to special interests.

But Whitman's rival is no ordinary bureaucrat.

Jerry Brown is one of the most quixotic career politicians of the modern era - a 72-year-old who was known as Governor Moonbeam for his unconventional approach when he first served as California's top politician from 1975-83. He returned to the public eye to revitalize the crime-ridden city of Oakland as mayor from 1998-06, and has served as California's attorney general since 2007.

With about one month to go before the election, the polls are indecisive - meaning that Whitman had failed so far to make her huge cash advantage count. That may be because her outsider portrayal doesn't work so well when the guy she's trying to replace is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He's also a rich businessman - and, needless to say, world-famous Hollywood action hero - who promised to ride in from the real world to reform the state capital of Sacramento. But with his second term ending, it's clear to most Californians that he's failed to deliver on that promise.

Whitman, who has adopted a tough stance on immigration issues, is unpopular with Latinos, especially after her Mexican housekeeper of 10 years came forward this week to claim she was fired as soon as Whitman decided to run for governor.

'I felt she was throwing me away like a piece of garbage,' Nicandra Diaz said at a press conference. 'She treated me as if I was not a human being.'

Fiorina is trailing Boxer in the polls - a reflection, analysts say, of strong Democratic support in a state where US president Barack Obama remains much more popular than he has in most of the country.

Daniel Swirl, professor of politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, says it makes sense for Republicans to use female candidates to try to overcome the party's 'good-old boy' image.

The fact that these women are independently wealthy reflects the huge cost of mounting a campaign in California, with its expensive media markets and multicultural population of some 37 million people.

'Barbara Boxer has been fairly safe because she always had enough money to scare away quality opponents,' Swirl said. 'Self-financed celebrities are the way to get around that problem.'

Ultimately, however, none of the three woman and one man vying for election will be able to solve California's debilitating problems, Swirl says.

'We're focusing on individuals when the entire political system is broken,' Swirl said, pointing to the plethora of voter initiatives that complicate the economy and government of the most populous state in America.

The most serious impediment to California's future is the requirement that the state budget be passed by a two-thirds majority. A voter initiative to overturn that rule is up for the vote in November.

'That's the most important issue in this election,' Swirl says. 'Without changing that, whoever wins will fail. How can you produce a coherent platform when you face this huge barrier to getting simple business done?'