Al Checchi, Bill Simon, Jane Harman, Michael Huffington, Steve Westly ...
The list of super-rich candidates who limped away in defeat from California's last Election Day is long. It's about to get longer next year.
The curse of the self-financed, wealthy candidate is being tested yet again, as two tech billionaires, Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, vie for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.
Another wealthy candidate, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, opened an exploratory committee this month to challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.
As the campaigns prepare to heat up after Labor Day, the three Republicans share more than deep pockets and promises to apply corporate discipline to government.
They're also confronting voters who haven't been kind to wealthy candidates, many of whom bring little political experience on their resumes.
That history includes energy executive Huffington's record-breaking, unsuccessful Senate campaign and businessman Ron Unz's gubernatorial loss in 1994; Checchi's and Harman's doomed gubernatorial campaigns in 1998; Simon's failed run for governor four years later; and eBay executive Westly's unsuccessful bid for the same office in 2006.
Notable exceptions are Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who spent about $5 million of his own money -- out of $19.4 million raised -- in the 2003 recall campaign and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who spent $2.5 million of her fortune -- out of $12.5 million -- to narrowly defeat Huffington.
"There are traps that a wealthy candidate can easily fall into because there are precedents at work against them," said Darry Sragow, who was Checchi's campaign manager. "The goal is to know how to not fall into those traps."
Sragow speaks from experience. Checchi, a former co-chairman for Northwest Airlines, spent about $35 million of his $700 million fortune hoping to capture the Democratic nomination.
Then-Lt. Gov. Gray Davis ended up winning with less than a fourth of Checchi's budget and less than half the money of Harman, who sank about $17 million of her family's electronics industry fortune into the race.
Four years later, Davis beat another wealthy candidate, Republican Bill Simon, for re-election. This time, the incumbent had built a massive war chest.
Garry South, Davis' campaign chief, said corporate giants-turned-candidates often doom themselves by stepping into the biggest trap awaiting them -- an excess of hubris. South was also an adviser to Westly's 2006 campaign.
"They come into politics thinking they're better than everybody," South said without naming specific candidates. "Everyone else is a helpless bureaucrat. They come in with an attitude problem, and that attitude shows. They come off as arrogant, smug, flippant, full of themselves."
But even Republican analysts said they worried that Whitman and Poizner would fall into a parallel trap facing wealthy candidates -- voter suspicion that they're trying to buy public office.
Making the candidate personable and human is key to overcoming that perception, said Jon Fleischman, Southern California vice chairman of the California Republican Party and publisher of the FlashReport conservative blog. That means "overexposing" the candidate, Fleischman said -- having the candidate talk often to the media, clearly explaining political positions and diving into public appearances.
Whitman, however, has treaded carefully, hewed closely to her talking points and declined debates. That approach has juiced the fears of some Republicans that Whitman, as governor, would follow Arnold Schwarzenegger's example and tack left once in office, Fleischman said.
"A stereotype is that a very wealthy person would erect barriers between them and the public," he said. "I think (Whitman) should make herself overly available."
Poizner spokesman Jarrod Agen responded that voters already know Poizner from the years he's spent in public service before running for governor, currently as the state's insurance commissioner.
Whitman, Agen emphasized, has no such experience.
"It's extremely naive to think that the political world is the same as the corporate world, and extremely smart people still fall into the trap," Agen said. "Steve realizes the differences and learned that very early on and used it to run a local race" for state Assembly, which he lost.
Whitman spokeswoman Sarah Pompei said Whitman's lack of experience has actually been seen as a positive among Republicans tired of business as usual.
Like other business-world candidates, Whitman has touted her bio at every opportunity-- she takes credit for turning the online auction company eBay into a worldwide phenomenon after joining it as CEO in 1998. Whitman left the company in 2007 as its fortunes began a slow decline.
E-mail Jack Chang at (at)sacbee.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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