Meg Whitman. Meggy, to her friends. The former CEO of eBay. Her official campaign slogan is "Money talks. Bullshit walks." She is running for governor of California. If Arnold can do it ...
Meg's main and really only competition is Jerry Brown. Brown, as many long-time Californians know, has had a love/hate affair with this state going back decades. The Dead Kennedys lampooned him. Bill Clinton took him to task. He tasted the sweet, sweet juices of Linda Ronstadt.
When it comes down to the nitty gritty, California's choices come down to a guy who screwed a popular singer, or a woman who made her fortune on people selling broken Hummels. If history is any indication, Brown may have this one in the bag.
California loves a character. Be it the kindly uncle going senile Reagan. The Terminator. Moonbeam (voted into office twice). The KKK supported Friend Richardson. We've voted in our share of yawn inducing stiffs, too. Most recently that would be Gray Davis, whose very name invokes notions of fog and the missionary position ... with no eye contact.
Meg is hard to warm up to that even women voters have a hard time supporting her. (Do you even hear anything about Tea Parrots supporting her?) Perhaps its her tired, over-achiever look, or just the fact that she seems built like a linebacker. Either way, women have been noticeably quiet on this race, which leads saner minds to believe that saner minds are going with Jerry. Meg comes across to females as the female boss who will do anything to keep her power, while Jerry comes across as a harmless guy whose most heinous crime would be to shoot a sneaky glance at your breasts when he thinks you aren't looking.
In the end, the issues don't matter much to the majority of California's voters. If they did, Meg would've never been ahead in the polls, as very little she said made any sense. Nope, what matters to the people of the state I currently call "home" is how much comfort they get from their candidates. As long as a candidate has enough money and doesn't come across as a modern-day Mr. Beckert, he or she should be fine. (And I should note that by the end of Maudiences felt some sympathy for Mr. Beckert despite his pedophile/murderer status.)
Meg is no child-killing pedophile ... at least not that I can tell. She does, however, come across as little more than a bully in a business suit. Californians may not take to that as well as they would to Brown, who is older than his opponent yet looks ten times more livelier. You can picture Meg downing her pills nightly in a ritualistic fashion as she chases them with bourbon. Brown is more of a tofu kind of guy, and as a state we love that.
The race has been tight, and probably will be tight until the last ballot is counted (however falsely). The only given is that if Brown wins very little will change in California, and if Meg wins things will get worse. Ideal? Hell no. Reality? Very much so. I'd rather have the staus quo in place than face a world where Meg has some sort of power over an economy which rivals that of many countries.
California is on the cusp of madness. How it goes will depend on who is at the helm. My prediction? The man who, as described by the Dead Kennedys, has an aura that "smiles and never frowns."
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