When former eBay CEO Meg Whitman announced more than two years ago that she was running for governor, many Californians asked, "Is she crazy?"
Here was a billionaire with all the money in the world who had retired in her early 50s and could spend her life clipping stock coupons and becoming a hero by doling out millions to charity. Why would she want to enter the rough and tumble world of politics and subject herself to merciless personal attacks?
And now that she's rumored to be at least temporarily replacing short-time CEO Leo Apotheker at HP -- a storied Silicon Valley company struggling to find its way back to prominence -- some Californians might be asking the "crazy" question again.
But some of those who got to know her well by working on her unsuccessful 2010 campaign say they wouldn't be surprised in the least if she ended up leading HP.
"This is an individual who doesn't know the word 'quit,'" said former campaign spokesman Hector Barajas, a Republican strategist. "She's always looking for the next challenge."
Many California political analysts also say that they wouldn't be shocked if the 55-year-old Whitman set out to rescue a dysfunctional HP in the same way she had hoped to save a dysfunctional California.
"Meg Whitman going back to Silicon Valley is no more surprising than Jerry Brown running for governor again," said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California.
"There were a lot of reasons she didn't get elected governor," but not being a successful businesswoman wasn't one of them, he added.
Most Californians barely knew Margaret Cushing Whitman when she launched her campaign in February 2009. But after she began pulling more than $140 million out of her own pocket to run a ubiquitous TV and radio ad campaigns, Whitman became a household name.
"Why does someone fabulously wealthy want to throw themselves into politics?" asked Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution who wrote speeches for Republican Gov. Pete Wilson. "It gets back into how the person became that person.
"Yes, ego is a factor, as is vanity," he said. But "you don't come fabulously successful in the business world if you're not driven by challenges."
Added Melissa Michelson, a political science professor at Menlo College in Whitman's hometown of Atherton: "She's still fairly young and wants to accomplish something more in her life. It could just be a feeling that this can't be it."
In last year's primary, Whitman crushed her GOP opponent, Steve Poizner, but then struggled against Brown, a wily political veteran with strong allies in the labor movement who depicted Whitman as just another corporate tool. Her chances of winning dropped dramatically several weeks before the general election when activist attorney Gloria Allred revealed that Whitman had employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper -- and then fired her after the maid asked her for help in gaining legal status.
After Brown handily beat her, friends say, Whitman went into a deep funk. In recent months, however, she has begun giving media interviews again. And on Tuesday she was in San Jose to announce that her family foundation would donate $2.5 million to support the expansion of Summit Public Schools, a charter school organization based in Redwood City.
At the event, she insisted to reporters that she wasn't getting back into politics. The prospect of leading another Silicon Valley icon, however, never came up.
Contact Ken McLaughlin at (408) 920-5552.
