Three Republican candidates for governor are beginning to joust in public, and Silicon Valley exec Meg Whitman, who has never before held public office, is being slammed on her voting record, of all things. That is, the fact that she didn't register to vote until she was 46.
From the L.A. Times account of the debate, held at the GOP's state convention in Indian Wells:
[S]tate Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a mapping software mogul...called on Whitman to drop out of the race for the good of the party. The former chief executive of EBay, he argued, would lead Republicans to certain defeat in a general election, thanks to the civic indifference indicated by her voting record.
Whitman's response to the non-voting revelations, from the Times story:
"What I have said is that I did not vote as often as I should, I did not register as often as I should, and I'm sorry about that, and there's no excuse for it," she said.
Pressed again to explain why she bypassed national, state and local elections, she declined. "I think it doesn't look good, right? I made a mistake." She added, "Leaders stand up and take accountability for their mistakes, and that's exactly what I'm doing."
Third GOP governor candidate, former congressman and state finance director Tom Campbell, "mocked Poizner and Whitman, though not by name, for promising to reduce taxes and spending without, for the most part, specifying cuts," the Times reported.
The Sacramento Bee story that broke the Whitman non-voting scandal.
From my berth at Reason magazine, I once wrote a libertarian-themed defense of non-voting.
Previous City of Angles blogging on California's already-hot 2010 gubernatorial race.
The image associated with this post was taken by Flickr user TechShowNetwork. It was used under user Creative Commons license.
Subscribe to City of Angles's feed.
In the age of Twitter, t must be difficult to make the move from the somewhat private realm of CEO to the oh-so-public realm of politics.
I'm not sure if your article on not voting is really relevant to Meg's case though. If she didn't vote until she was 46 because of the principle, then that means she could not morally support every president from Nixon to George W. Bush. So either her politics have been irreconcilable with every US president since the 70s, or she simply didn't care about performing her civic duty.
Either way, it doesn't seem like we're going to get an answer from her...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw5BtkJw5C0