Year Of The (Rich) Woman

This past Tuesday's primary wins by Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in California, along with other high-profile campaigns by women for federal and state offices, has many pundits declaring the 2010 election to be "The Year Of The Woman". A closer look at some of these candidates, however, indicates that their personal wealth, and their willingness to use that wealth to finance their campaigns, may have more to do with their electoral success than gender.

Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, spent about $71 million of her personal wealth, estimated to be in the billions, to win the Republican primary for Governor of California.

Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, spent $5.5 million from her own pocket to become the Republican candidate for Senate from California. Some of that money may have come from the $21 million severance pay she received when HP fired her in 2005.

Linda McMahon (no relation to me, thank goodness), the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), spent $14 million of her own money to win the endorsement of the Connecticut state Republican convention last month as that party's candidate for the U.S. Senate. Yes, the person who brought us "professional wrestlers" Hulk Hogan and The Rock on TV shows like "Raw" and "Smackdown" now wants to help run the federal government.

The irony is that all of these free-spending Republican candidates are running on a platform of "fiscal conservatism". Go figure.

Instead of examining how these candidates made their fortunes, or questioning the wide pay disparities between CEOs and average workers at these corporations, the media is instead focusing on Alvin Greene, who won Tuesday's primary in South Carolina to become the Democratic candidate for Senate, and asking how an unemployed vet got the $10,400 filing fee to get on the ballot. Perhaps the fact that media corporations receive millions of dollars from candidates like Whitman, Fiorina, and McMahon for TV and radio ads, while Greene did not buy any media advertising time, has something to do with it?

Class, rather than gender or ethnicity, is still the strongest dividing line in our society. Individuals and corporations with a great deal of money have far more influence in the decisions which affect our lives than the average citizen. Citigroup even acknowledged this situation in their infamous 2005 report by calling the U.S. a "plutonomy". Electing a female millionaire, who made her fortune in the corporate world, will be no more liberating than electing male millionaires has ever been.

In 1973, Pink Floyd's song "Money" has the rich narrator saying "Think I'll buy me a football team" as a fun way to spend some excess cash. Today, the preferred form of recreational spending for the rich seems to be buying a Senate seat or governorship (former Goldman Sachs partner Jon Corzine managed to buy both in New Jersey before the voters finally got sick of him), but sometimes they'll settle for a mayor's office (Michael Bloomberg in New York City).

Money, so they say,

Is the root of all evil today