Here's the good news: Meg Whitman will not be governor of California. That might not seem like much, compared to all the bad news, about Congress, and Senator Rand Paul, but it's something. And maybe even more than something.
Maybe it's very good news.
Meg Whitman will not be governor of California. That means Mitt Romney -- from whom Meg sprung, like Athena from the head of Zeus -- can't count on winning the California primary in 2012. He might win it, but he can't promise to win it. That makes him less inevitable as the nominee, and the perception of inevitability is all he's got. Meg Whitman losing today means the Republican nomination in 2012 is anybody's game.
Even Sarah Palin's.
And that's very good news. Because Obama could probably beat her.
Probably.
And as for Meg?
It took a lifetime's work to lose that race. Sure, there was the tacky business with the housekeeper, and the money turned people off, combined with a grinding total lack of warmth, charm, wit or humility. But, in the end, it was probably over before it started. Probably the fact that she never voted was all we needed to know.
It was the key to everything else. In the her fifty years on Earth before the morning Mitt told her to be governor, Meg Whitman just didn't give a shit.
And it wasn't just not voting. As far as anyone can tell she never went to a PTA meeting, or signed a petition, or wrote a letter to the editor, or put her change in the plastic can for Ronald McDonald House. Nothing.
She spent a lot of money on ads about herself. Believe me, we would have heard.
There've been other candidates with spotty voting records. She was the first candidate who had never done anything. She had the civic footprint of a stillborn.
Her only claim to public office was that she wanted it, and she had spent her whole life doing nothing but making money.
Which isn't, when it comes right down to it, good enough.
There are some also who, either from zeal in attending to their own business or through some sort of aversion to their fellow-men, claim that they are occupied solely with their own affairs, without seeming to themselves to be doing anyone any injury. But while they steer clear of the one kind of injustice, they fall into the other: they are traitors to social life, for they contribute to it none of their interest, none of their effort, none of their means.
-- De Officiis
Good riddance. And by that I mean "Ha ha fuck you."
One more thought from Cicero, on giving $140 million to political consultants who turn you into a joke:
The greater our prosperity, moreover, the more should we seek the counsel of friends, and the greater the heed that should be given to their advice. Under such circumstances also we must beware of lending an ear to sycophants or allowing them to impose upon us with their flattery. For it is easy in this way to deceive ourselves, since we thus come to think ourselves duly entitled to praise; and to this frame of mind a thousand delusions may be traced, when men are puffed up with conceit and expose themselves to ignominy and ridicule by committing the most egregious blunders.So much for this subject.