An eBay Republican
Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, has announced her candidacy for California governor next year. That state is a wreck and has been made worse by Gov. Schwarzenegger’s inability or refusal to take on the powerful organizations that have driven the state deeply into the red. Last week voters in California overwhelmingly defeated five propositions that would have raised taxes and fees. Their message was clear to the politicians in Sacramento that they’ve taken enough of their money and need to live within their means.
Last week The Weekly Standard ran a good cover story on Meg Whitman. If you don’t know her its pretty likely you’ve heard of her company, eBay. “When she arrived in 1998, eBay had 30 employees, $4 million in revenues, and 300,000 registered users. When she left in 2008, it had 15,000 employees, $7.7 billion in revenues, and nearly 300 million registered users worldwide, more than 12 million of them in California.”
Whitman gets it when it comes to capitalism and the role of government. “I was president and CEO of eBay for 10 years,” she said. “And eBay reinforced two important Republican concepts with which I had been raised.”
The first: Americans are “motivated by economic opportunity to achieve great things.” By creating e-commerce, eBay “became the home of so many inspired individuals, Americans with the courage and passion to create businesses and jobs. I ran eBay with those folks in mind. We purposely kept regulation on eBay to a minimum so that small business could innovate.”
The second: “Less government is simply better.” Her career before eBay “had not involved me too closely with taxation, government bureaucracy, or regulation,” she said. “But after years of watching government try to tax and regulate the success of eBay sellers, I left eBay with a strong belief that government’s role in our lives should be limited. . . . Government can only help create the conditions for prosperity. Prosperity itself is up to each of us.”
Finally, she seems to understand better than most politicians how technology can improve lives. Here’s her example of how dated California’s government has become.
Sacramento, the state capital, “is the most inward looking place I’ve ever seen,” Whitman says. Information technology, constantly updated, runs eBay. “But the information infrastructure that runs the state of California is stuck in 1982. . . . We run 17 financial systems at the state on 1982 Oracle financials. We don’t actually know what the high school graduation rate is because we don’t have the IT infrastructure that tracks the kids.”
This should be a fun race to watch in 2010.
Hey James!
Yes! Meg Whitman is the caliber of republicans the GOP should be considering! Not Limbaugh, Cheney, Laura Ginghram, Schlessinger, etc! (Sorry, getting carried away!)
Agree this race will be interesting!
OK, that makes TWO republicans of yours that I like!
Good article!
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