Editorial: Spending $120 million an odd way to signal fiscal restraint
Published 1:14 pm Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2010
Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO, ran for California governor to restore a sense of fiscal responsibility to Sacramento.
She spent more of her own money, $120 million, campaigning for governor of California than anyone else who has ever run for office.
What better way to tame her state’s free-spending habits than to outspend Al Gore’s presidential bid?
California’s previous record was $78 million in 2002 by former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis from thousands of donors.
In mid-September the Republican candidate’s became the single most expensive non-presidential campaign ever, surpassing the $109 million New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg expended on his 2009 re-election — about $190 a vote.
For all her spending, however, and complaints that Whitman is trying to buy the election, she hasn’t pulled away from Gov. Moonbeam, Attorney General Jerry Brown, whose $4 million campaign spent 3 percent of her total.
Polls have shown the two tied at 41 percent to Brown leading 52-43.
After four decades in state politics, he is a household name and in the state registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 10 percentage points.
According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, from 2000 to 2009, only 11 percent of some 6,000 state-level candidates who contributed at least half of their campaign’s spending out of their own pockets ended up victorious.
While money can’t buy you love, Whitman’s message is that California must slash 40,000 state jobs to erase a $19.1 billion deficit, lower taxes to energize the economy and reform California’s education system.
Whitman argues her $1.3 billion personal fortune frees her from the partisan fray, contrary to Brown, a Big Government liberal beholden to public employee unions.
As a tech CEO, Whitman hasn’t just carpet-bombed the airwaves with a TV ad blitz, but spent her money in ways that reportedly impress strategists from both parties, such as reaching out to the considerable Latino population in Spanish-language media.
Targeting exceeds ethnicity. The Whitman campaign employs sophisticated “microtargeting” software that tailors mailings and phone calls to voters not just on party affiliation, but also purchasable consumer data such as car ownership and magazine subscriptions.
Whitman is also experimenting with interactive television ads. Viewers can press a button on their remote to receive a free Whitman bumper sticker. She mines another name for her database.
According to one estimate, a California voter could have received more than 16 mailings on specific issues from Whitman.
For the time being, we can’t limit how much money a candidate can give to her own campaign.
The Supreme Court ruled that a violation of free speech absent an unlikely constitutional amendment.