Arnold Schwarzenegger’s regrettable reign as governor of California has made the road rockier for Meg Whitman, the Republican who hopes to succeed him. In other circumstances, the Republican party would be thanking its lucky stars for sending them a candidate like Whitman, the former CEO of eBay. Twice declared the most powerful woman in business by Fortune magazine, she’s nearly universally praised as smart, successful, and relentlessly hardworking. She’s on the cover of this month’s Fortune, smiling serenely while holding a horse on a seaside ranch at Half Moon Bay — an image that can only be described as Reaganesque. “She’s the perfect Republican to run out there, considering shifting political sands in California,” says Ed McFadden, a top adviser and speechwriter to former presidential candidate Fred Thompson. But Californians heard a similar pitch back in 2003, after Schwarzenegger’s Democratic predecessor, Gray Davis, ran the state off the rails. A phenomenally successful figure, untainted by the compromises of a lifetime in Sacramento politics, was going to ride into town on a white horse and terminate wasteful spending and burdensome state taxes. By most standards, the Schwarzenegger era has been a disappointment, arguably an outright failure. After Schwarzenegger pledged to nurse the state back to fiscal health, his toothless reforms and frequent capitulation to the state’s Democrat-controlled legislature have brought California to catastrophe. Today the state endures population loss and skyrocketing foreclosures, the largest number of bank failures, the highest state income-tax rate, the largest deficits, the third-worst bond rating, and the fifth-worst unemployment rate in the nation. Fortune’s cover asks, “Can Meg Whitman Save California?” Before she’s in position to tackle the Herculean task of cleaning up after the star of Hercules in New York, she’ll face daunting tasks in both the primary and general elections. Other Republicans interested in the race include California insurance commissioner Steve Poizner, one of the few Republicans to have won a statewide election in recent cycles, and former congressman Tom Campbell. On the Democratic side, former governor and current attorney general Jerry Brown, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom are among those expected to be contenders. Despite the impressive résumé, Whitman has not yet set the California political world afire. At the state Republican convention she had the slickest pamphlets and the biggest booth, but her speech was described as “vanilla.” Her campaign offers the thoroughly generic slogan, “A New California.” While she has some relatively detailed plans, one of her main themes is that California’s government should be run more like a business. The mood may change by fall of 2010, but right now Whitman is celebrating the virtues of business at exactly the wrong moment: a time of populist rage. The approach is either brave — throwing cold water on a wildfire of unthinking anti-business fury — or astonishingly tone-deaf. One of Whitman’s early moves illustrates the difficulties involved in bringing a political neophyte to California’s high-stakes campaign world. To build an online community for her campaign, she turned to Tokoni, a firm headed by two of her former eBay colleagues, Alex Kazim and Mary Lou Song. Tokoni’s lone work in the political arena before this was with WomenCount, a political nonprofit promoting a push to establish a Presidential Commission on Women. Not exactly the most politically plugged-in approach, and that’s been noticed: A highly regarded GOP Internet consultant, who indicated he didn’t want to trash Whitman, said he was underwhelmed by her website. “All I see is her odd poppy flower logo coupled with vague and dreamy rhetoric. Is it just me, or is that just utterly tone deaf? People are losing their jobs and their homes. They want specifics and solutions, not a tourism brochure.” (A section of Whitman’s site explains, “As the state flower, the California poppy represents all that Meg values about California: prosperity, renewal, unity. . . . Early settlers saw poppy-covered hills and believed they had found the Golden State. . . . That’s why you’ll see so many references to California poppies on Meg 2010.”) If there’s a parallel to Whitman as a Republican candidate, it’s her former boss, Mitt Romney. Whitman had little association with politics until 2006, when Romney asked her for help with his campaign — and she became one of his finance co-chairs. She was praised as a great asset and became an adviser to John McCain when he won the nomination. She gave a speech at the convention. A Romney pedigree looks better today than it did a year ago, when he narrowly lost the California presidential primary; since the economic crisis hit, the GOP has needed figures with a deep background in economics and Romney’s encyclopedic knowledge of the business world. But it’s not clear that Whitman can rely on that to distinguish her from the field. The Republican race has already uncovered one important fissure among the candidates, the issue of a Schwarzenegger-backed state initiative that goes before the voters May 19. Proposition 1A would extend higher taxes on sales, use, income, and vehicles for one or two years, totaling $16 billion in increases, and would limit certain state spending in better fiscal years. Campbell is the only Republican candidate supporting Proposition 1A, calling it necessary with a looming $40 billion deficit and Democrats running the legislature. Poizner has denounced the initiative and declared opposition to it “a matter of Republican principle.” Whitman’s opposition has been expressed quietly, in a letter to the state Republican executive committee. It is a sign of how far Schwarzenegger’s star has fallen that his own party is voting to oppose his initiatives, even as the governor’s starpower has proved year by year less capable of influencing a liberal, free-spending legislature. A strategist employed by one of her rivals frames the arguments against her: “The question Meg Whitman is going to have to answer is, how she would succeed where Arnold failed.” “Arnold burned everybody,” said a longtime GOP consultant, and veterans of his campaigns are not exactly hot political commodities. Steve Schmidt, the architect of Schwarzenegger’s election win, exited Whitman’s campaign before it officially began, citing family and business plans. It’s early in the 2010 cycle; about 14 months remain between now and the primary election. And at this point, California GOP insiders give Whitman a 60 percent shot at the nomination. Forbes magazine estimates her net worth at $1.1 billion. A Washington consultant said a key yardstick of Whitman’s seriousness as a candidate will be reflected in her attendance on “the rubber-chicken circuit . . . all the chambers of commerce and all the business groups in places like Fresno and Bakersfield.” In fact, she’s begun hitting that circuit. Whitman’s got a good biography and some good ideas. But a tough primary, followed by what is sure to be a brutal general election against a hungry Democratic party, mean a hard road ahead. She’s going to need more than poppies. — Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot for NRO.