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Susan Estrich: California’s Whitman Neglects Her Civic Duty
On my way to work this morning, I heard not one but two advertisements urging me to vote for former eBay CEO Meg Whitman as the next governor of California. The ads touted her decades of experience working for such companies as Disney and Hasbro before taking the helm at eBay in 1998 as its first CEO. The pitch was that California needs someone who understands business and job creation as its next chief executive.
Hard to disagree with that. And as one who has for decades urged women, Republican or Democrat, to seek higher office, I have to say that it’s about time California had a woman governor.
But shouldn’t she also be a good citizen?
According to a detailed analysis by the Sacramento Bee, the facts of which remain unchallenged by the Whitman campaign, Whitman didn’t bother to vote while she was earning all those qualifications to be governor. Not in Ohio or Massachusetts or New Jersey or Rhode Island or anyplace else she lived from ages 18 to 46.
Reagan against Carter? That was a snoozer for Whitman.
She didn’t vote for or against Bill Clinton. Yawn.
Senators, governors, mayors — none of them managed to capture her interest long enough to say yea or nay. Initiatives? I can’t even begin to list what she missed.
As a matter of fact, she didn’t even bother to register to vote until 2002. And the next year, when nearly 9 million of us went to the polls — or just mailed in our permanent absentee ballots — for the recall election that put Arnold Schwarzenegger in office, well, she skipped that one, too.
Oh, and she didn’t decide she was a Republican in a state that limits primary voting to declared voters until 2007.
Whitman offers no excuse for her record of dereliction of civic duty. How could she? California is a state where checking a single box makes you a permanent absentee voter, where they send you the ballot way in advance and all you have to do is drop it in the mail. The parties outdo each other, and that is putting mildly, in “helping” people both register to vote and sign up to do it by mail. Voting, by any measure, is a whole lot easier than almost anything else Whitman has done in the past 30 years.
So why didn’t she bother?
Only she can answer that question, and I’m quite sure she won’t even try, since there really isn’t much to say. The irrefutable point is that she didn’t care. I find that unacceptable in someone who wants my vote.
As far as I know, her one vote would not, strictly speaking, have made the difference in any of the elections she missed. Economists will tell you that from the individual perspective, voting is a very inefficient thing to do with your time for just that reason. The Freakonomics folks tell a joke that illustrates the point: Two economists are embarrassed to have run into each other at the polls and quickly explain to each other that they are there only because their wives made them come.
Of course, if we all took that position, our democracy would fall apart. Whitman was counting on the rest of us to do what she couldn’t be bothered to do.
Whitman’s consistent failure to register, much less vote, reflects a decided lack of interest in public affairs and government that is odd, to say the least, in someone who now wants to be governor. Did she wake up one day with an insatiable interest in politics and government? Did it really take her until she was 51 to determine whether she was a Republican or a Democrat? Those are questions she is going to have to answer, repeatedly, as she seeks the Republican nomination against two highly qualified candidates. State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and former Congressman Tom Campbell have both, according to the same reports, voted early and often in local, state and federal races.
But the more basic question is one of values. It’s about character, not how interested you are. I know lots of people who are as uninterested in politics as I am in the World Cup, but they vote. I know many people in jobs as tough as hers, living lives that are tougher still, but they vote. I have sent drivers to nursing homes to take men and women on their last legs to the polls, because it was important.
What does it say about Whitman that for all those years she couldn’t be bothered? What business does she have asking for our votes? She was not a good citizen.
— Best-selling author Susan Estrich is the Robert Kingsley Professor of Law and Political Science at the USC Law Center and was campaign manager for 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis. Click here to contact her.
Comments
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» on 10.06.09 @ 06:55 AM
Your premise is messed up. Voting is not a DUTY, it is a privilege. An uninformed or disinterested voter can and does cause more damage than an informed interested one. So please don’t make voting some kind of duty. Stop encouraging people to vote just because they are flesh and blood. They may not have a brain.
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» on 10.06.09 @ 07:01 AM
Is that really the biggest dirt you could scrape up on her? She didn’t vote? Wow, she must be squeeky clean then.
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» on 10.06.09 @ 07:26 AM
Big deal. She wasn’t interested then. She is interested now.
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» on 10.06.09 @ 07:29 AM
She’s got my vote; whether it counts or not.
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» on 10.06.09 @ 09:16 AM
I think her not voting isn’t that big of a deal. People are correct to criticize her for it, but it alone doesn’t disqualify someone for public service. I disagree somewhat with the first poster’s comments, however. In my opinion, voting is a civic duty, just as much as becoming informed on the issues and candidates. It most certainly is not a privilege! That is a dangerous attitude that leads only to voter discrimination practices, such as those in the South that were used to prevent or discourage African-Americans from voting.
Good citizens participate in their democracy by becoming informed and voting regularly. Meg Whitman wasn’t a good citizen in that regard, nor was Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger, so it obviously isn’t a requirement for being governor.
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» on 10.06.09 @ 10:13 AM
Voting records for San Francisco from before 1992 are not available. Go ask the City of San Francisco. The Sacramento Bee committed journalistic malpractice by running with this story and now Susan Estrich has taken the bait, hook, line, and sinker. Yet another stellar column from Ms. Estrich. What a waste of electricity.
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» on 10.06.09 @ 01:08 PM
Given the endless series of clowns, fibbers, demagogues and under-achievers that
California voters have had to face down on their ballots, it should not be crucial in
a state of over 36-million people whether Whitman votes every election or not.
What is much more important is whether this talented executive has even the most
remote notion how State government works, or how a bill moves through the State
Legislature.
These were the two Achilles heels of our current governor, who came in mouthing all the platitudes Pete Wilson’s old handlers wrote for him, like it was just another movie script:
Blow up the boxes. End waste. Eliminate unncessary programs. Find “hidden” revenue. Stop the borrowing. Reform the tax and revenue system. Work with/against
the legislature (i.e. “Girly Men’) to get things done.
You remember. His hard-charging celeberity status wowed people in Sacramento for
... about six months. After which, his subsequent service was doing Charlie Chaplin
political pratfalls on budget banana peels every 3-6 months.
Government does not work like Disney or EBay. They do not have to deal with the
mentally ill, international drug dealers, freeway construction, urban sprawl, new
immigrants from foreign lands, or being a “donor” state to the federal treasury.
Is there anything in Whitman’s background that suggests that she could adapt her
successful private sector management style to run a huge civil-service bureaucracy,
where she would NOT have the power to immediately terminate lower echelon folks
who disagee with her, and refuse to fully carry out her mandates?
Would she really be a better bridge-builder to the legislature and various interest
groups than Arnold has been? As a member of the minority party, she’d better be
if she hopes to get anything done. Is there any evidence she’s capable of that?
Estrich should focus on the Big Picture issues. Can the little stuff about whether this
candidate or that one showed up to vote 9 years ago. Doesn’t matter.
What does is whether any of the current crop of candidates have solutions to CA’s big problems, and the skill and courage to bring those solutions to fruition.
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» on 10.06.09 @ 05:10 PM
LTR, her greatest qualification may be that she does not know how to run a large civil service bureaucracy and instead runs it like a large business. After all, one of the crippling problems that our state has is it is TOO LARGE a BUREAUCRACY. As far as the voting thing goes, not voting is in itself a form of voting, is it not? I agree with the first commenter, voting is to damned important to leave up to the general public. Our founding fathers were wise enough to know that allowing everyone to vote you invite the public to raid the treasury and the destruction of civilization is not far behind. They set a system of restrictions in place to make sure voters were responsible and somewhat interested in preserving the country rather than their own situation.
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» on 10.09.09 @ 04:33 PM
So, AN50 if you don’t think everyone should be allowed to vote, what criteria would you use to determine who gets to vote? A written test? Ok, then, I as an unabashed liberal will volunteer to write the questions for the test, and only my buddies will get to grade the test to determine who gets to vote. Don’t like that idea? How about a short oral quiz at the polling place? That would probably go over well. Or maybe just certain party affiliations can vote? Certain income levels? Zip codes? Skin color?
The only way for a representative democracy to function is for all citizens to be allowed to vote, AND for all citizens to take it upon themselves to become educated.
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