Opinion: Walters: Why Whitman lost
By Dan Walters
Political journalism, it has been said, is showing up after the battle is over and shooting the wounded -- and one of them who deserves verbal execution is Mike Murphy, who ran Meg Whitman's very expensive, very unsuccessful campaign for California governor.
Murphy -- much like President Barack Obama, as a matter of fact -- takes nominal responsibility for losing the election but then offers up excuses implying that he shouldn't really be held accountable.
In his first post-election interview, on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Murphy had this to say: "We got beat. And, you know, I ran the campaign. I take responsibility for it. It's a very blue state, and it's getting bluer. As the red, you know, wave, kind of went one way, there was a bit of blue riptide coming the other way."
In other words, blame Mother Nature.
Billionaire Whitman spent $150 million more or less, most of it her own money, and paid Murphy a reported $90,000 a month. He failed spectacularly, with Whitman losing to the relatively cheap, but clever, campaign of Democrat Jerry Brown.
Whitman was the perfect candidate only in that she was willing to spend oodles. She was little known outside the corporate world, had a somewhat off-putting public demeanor and positions that were nothing more than glorified slogans. Although she started running in early 2009, she ran away -- literally -- from journalists' questions for many months and changed positions frequently.
The campaign that Murphy and company executed was pedestrian at best, saturating the airwaves with advertising that never really said anything or convinced voters that Whitman could make their lives better. Even the negative ads on Brown were lackluster, even though his long political history was a potential gold mine.
One of Murphy's excuses for failure, aired on "Meet the Press," was that Whitman was a victim of public-employee unions who "run California politics" and spent heavily during the summer to counter Whitman's ads and protect Brown from spending his own limited resources.
"They paid for Jerry Brown's campaign," Murphy said, adding: "The big unions in the last couple of years have spent $300 million on politics. So, you either can't raise enough money to compete, and they swamp you "... or you spend your own money, but if you're a self-funder, the press wants to make that money the issue."
Poor Murphy. He was given a virtually unlimited budget to run a campaign against a 72-year-old former governor with a relatively tiny campaign treasury. But he either gave his client very bad advice -- such as concealing the bombshell of hiring and then firing an illegal-immigrant housekeeper -- or gave her good advice that she ignored.
It was a campaign that, done right, could have succeeded. But it was a mediocre campaign that deserved to lose.
