Which smile is most pained? I'm going with the unknown guy in the middle. Trying way too hard there, guy.

The thought occurred to me today that Mitt Romney is reminding me an awful lot of Meg Whitman, 2010′s megabuck Republican candidate for Governor of California.

The parallels are there: both candidates came from business backgrounds and had astonishing personal wealth. Both boasted continuously about how their business experience would make them job-creating geniuses if they were elected, though Whitman’s tenure running eBay gave her better credibility to make this argument than Romney’s atop job-shredding Bain Capital. Both ran against Democrats that were viewed in a lukewarm fashion at best by the electorate–Jerry Brown’s favorability was underwater for most of the campaign, lest we forget. Whitman had an enormous amount of money to spend to defeat Jerry Brown, and wound up dropping over $100 million of her own cash to do so.

But she lost by a huge margin. This might be expected considering that California is more Democratic than the country, but the state doesn’t seem to have much of a problem electing Republican Governors that tend to be more moderate. In fact, there have only been three Democratic Governors since WWII in this state, and one of those got recalled. This race, in any event, was close most of way. But Whitman, who saw her campaign slide away for employing an illegal immigrant, was already dropping in the polls well before that story broke. The Times sums up the reasons for this:

Ms. Whitman has spent much of the campaign explaining why she had rarely voted before entering politics. Her record at eBay, including layoffs under her watch, has been the subject of scrutiny. And she has been assailed by independent fact-checkers for running what were described as misleading or false advertisements attacking Mr. Brown by portraying him as a big spender when he served as governor of California in the 1970s.

Sounding familiar? Romney has had a different issue with voting that probably won’t matter in November, but the rest of this echoes Romney completely. Romney even has a comparable story of employing an illegal immigrant to Whitman’s. And Whitman’s other major problem in the campaign? Failed flip-flops:

After assuming a relatively tough line on illegal immigration in the primary — though explicitly avoiding the tough anti-illegal immigrant law passed in Arizona — she moved, the moment the general election began, to appeal to Latino voters with an extensive and expensive Spanish-language campaign that extended from television airwaves to bus stops to billboards that read, “Más Trabajos,” or more jobs.

She flip-flopped a few times on cap-and-trade too, for what it’s worth. Not a great idea to be ambiguous on environmental policy in this state is all I’m saying. But that’s another story. The point is that taking a hard line on immigration, as Whitman and Romney have done in their primaries, is essentially a killer if you want to get any Hispanic support as a Republican. It doesn’t matter if you soften it later, Hispanics at this point are suspicious of Republicans over this and other issues and Democrats will absolutely trot it out endlessly and hammer it home with no end. Republicans have a very thin margin of error to trod with these voters, and both Whitman and (likely) Romney have already crossed it. Obama will probably get over 70% of the Hispanic vote, I’m predicting.

Whitman’s campaign, ultimately, failed to connect for many reasons. But the overall gestalt pointed to one reason: the people didn’t connect with someone who just luxuriated in wealth, felt entitled to get a position because of her wealth and status, and couldn’t relate to normal folk. As Ruben Navarette Jr. put it at the time:

So then why did Whitman lose? For one thing, she never connected with voters and that hurt her when the Brown campaign started pushing the message that she was this rich empress who lived in a bubble and couldn’t relate to average Californians. [...]

There are plenty of differences between the two cases, but I think there are enough similarities between Romney and Whitman to make it an interesting question, and possibly some hope for Democrats in November. It’s amazing how these two politicians seem to have almost identical backgrounds, strengths and weaknesses (though in fairness, Romney did actually win an election once). Personally, I long for the days when rich people thought politics was a dirty profession.