The last time I found myself in a hotel with a political novice running for governor, it was September 2003 and Arnold Schwarzenegger and I were in a penthouse suite of the Mission Inn in Riverside. He teased me about my shorts (it was 104 degrees outside), and he spent most of our 20-minute conversation filibustering and not saying anything specific about policy. (The one thing he did say – that he would protect the Prop 98 funding guarantee with his life – turned out to be a mistake.)
Older if not wiser, I wore a tie to meet Meg Whitman (and House Republican Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, who was in town to endorse her) in an outdoor patio at the Century Plaza Thursday morning. And she was nothing if not specific. In 25 minutes, she dived eagerly into the weeds of policy – individual and insurer mandates on health care, collective bargaining with public employees, charter school policy, and procurement.
I’ll get more into these policy details in later posts. (I’m bumping up against deadline and I’m late to a dentist appointment). But she was hardly predictable or doctrinaire. (She said that it might be time to require everyone to buy health insurance, which is a bit of a risk in a Republican primary). She’s also clearly someone who reads every word and sweats the details. When the conversation turned to Gov. Schwarzenegger’s California Performance Review, I asked her if she had read it.
“Twice,” was her reply.
One other bit of news before I run: both Whitman and Cantor said they opposed federal loan guarantees for California. Whitman was adamant that the state needs to solve its own problems. But asked for his political assessment of whether guarantees would be forthcoming, Cantor said that given the record of this Congress and the Obama administration, you never know.