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Throwing Good Money After Bad

By Alex Altman | @aaltman82 | November 17, 2010 | +

By Nov. 2, it seemed clear that a bulging checkbook wasn’t going to be enough to save Meg Whitman’s gubernatorial bid in California. Polls showed her trailing by a half-dozen points during the campaign’s final week. It seems she went down fighting. The Fresno Bee reports:

Whitman invested $2.6 million of her own wealth in her campaign on Nov. 2, the day she lost her bid for the governor’s office to Democrat Jerry Brown, according to a filing that appeared yesterday on the Secretary of State’s website.

That amount brought the billionaire former CEO’s total personal contribution to her campaign to a record-shattering $144,155,806.11.

Whitman’s was the priciest non-presidential campaign of all time. Brown beat her by 12 points.

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  • nflfoghorn

    Unfortunately down in FL Rick Crook spent $70M of his own stash to steal the governorship….

  • gysgt213

    But she is from “business” so the 144 million was a good sound investment and Obama is going to bail her out anyway.

  • anon76

    It was not only sound investment, it was also done at a fraction of the cost of the same job done by the public sector, because of … uh, … the invisible hand of the market, competition, and individual liberty.
    .
    Yeah, that’s the ticket!

  • Cliff

    I like it.
    .
    Obviously, if she had already been governor, she would have spent over $500 million to badly lose the race.
    .
    But as a private enterprise, she was able to lose with incredible efficiency!

  • certifiablylazy

    what a mockery

  • theotherjimmyolson

    I hate to go all class warfare, but if this isn’t conclusive evidence that we have a broken system I don’t know what is. That a person as pedestrian as Meg Whitman even has $144 million of her own money to blow on an election should be all the evidence you need.

  • allthingsinaname

    It is obscene.

  • Art Pepper

    Think of it as a stimulus package.

  • liberalmeltdown

    Now Jerry can run up the budget deficit and it won’t cost him a cent!. Ain’t that great?
    .
    I just hope that left in other states will be so joyful about bailing out California and paying for the left coast’s socialist experiment gone wrong. Here’s the tab so far: $500 billion.
    .
    Thanks in advance

  • apr2563

    California is a donor state. It gets back only $.78 for every tax payer dollar sent to Washington.
    .
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/17/joe-miller-a-study-in-ove_n_785067.html
    .
    In general, red states get back more money than they contribute.
    .
    Get your facts straight.

  • liberalmeltdown

    Yes apparently a BRAIN donor state. Your link is to an article about Joe Miller.
    .
    I was referring to the 500 billion DOLLARS in unfunded liabilities that California owes. You know anything about that? That’s not including the current 25 Billion $ hole in the budget that our out of control legislature just passed.

  • herby002

    liberal,

    “I was referring to the 500 billion DOLLARS in unfunded liabilities that California owes. You know anything about that? That’s not including the current 25 Billion $ hole in the budget that our out of control legislature just passed”

    Thank you for that little bit of info. Now I know that YOU are part of the problem that you’re carping about. Presumably you just voted on a number of propositions that might make things better in California.

    Please tell me how YOU voted on the props, so we know how you intend to wrestle the out of control legislature back into line, and erase the budget hole.

    Please?
    Please?

  • http://phd9.blogspot.com Paul Dirks

    Interesting that ‘direct democracy’ is the phenomenon that results in the biggest deficits. We could learn something from that – but we won’t.

  • constantweader

    Jerry Brown didn’t have much money — by Whitman standards — but his campaign ads against Whitman were devastating. In one, he showed Whitman parroting every bromide the currently unpopular Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger produced, & in the other he caught Whitman — in her own campaign ad, no less — saying how great things were back when Jerry Brown was governor in the 70s. Hilarious.

    And, oh yeah, Gov. Jerry didn’t have an undocumented, underpaid maid to throw under the bus.

    The Constant Weader at http://www.RealityChex.com

  • liberalmeltdown

    Are you April’s evil twin, Herby?

  • http://erieangel.wordpress.com erieangel

    That is an obscene amount of money. We really need to get money out of our democratic process. It just corrupts the process and all too often allows the one with the biggest purse the win. Its called buying the election.

  • herby002

    liberal,

    I’ll answer your question: No.

    Now, would you answer mine?
    …

    Please?
    Please?
    Please?

  • liberalmeltdown

    OK Herby, No.

  • bobcn1

    I think people were initially appalled by the viciousness and dishonesty of Whitman’s ads. But many people didn’t initially assume that the ads were truly representative of her and the race remained close. What finished her off was when she finally debated and it was revealed that she really is that vicious and dishonest.
    .
    Brown is well known in California and was a successful governor in the ’70s. He has a long history of honorable public service. That helped to insulate him from Whitman’s dishonest attack ads and diluted the impact of her campaign spending. Had Whitman’s opponent been someone less well known California would probably have Whitman as the next governor.

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