Tom Campbell bows out

With former congressman Tom Campbell dropping out of the California governor’s race Thursday, Republican voters will now be faced with a sharp choice: either a multimillionaire Silicon Valley businessman who has contributed $19 million toward his own election campaign, or a multimillionaire Silicon Valley businesswoman who has contributed $19 million toward her campaign.

Campbell was considered a long shot in large part because the UC Berkeley business school dean couldn’t keep up with his deep-pocketed competitors in fundraising. In a letter explaining his decision to end his gubernatorial bid in order to run for the U.S. Senate instead, Campbell wrote, “The path of public service and teaching is rewarding, but it does not afford one the ability to invest millions of dollars in a campaign for office.”

It may well be that GOP candidates Steve Poizner, an entrepreneur whose political experience dates back to 2006, when he was elected state insurance commissioner, or Meg Whitman, the former CEO of EBay, would make terrific governors -- perhaps their business experience would translate into the kind of expertise needed to run the nation’s most populous and fiscally challenged state. Yet it’s hard to escape the impression that these aren’t so much the most qualified candidates for the job as the magnates with the most fundraising magnetism.

Campbell, 57, served five terms in Congress, where he developed a reputation as a principled fiscal conservative, and has also served as a state senator and as state finance director. Though his liberal positions on social issues such as gay marriage and abortion make hard-core conservatives cringe, he has a demonstrated ability to work across the aisle to build consensus. These are rare traits in a capital paralyzed by partisan rancor and, until the recent financial crisis, a tendency to overspend. Yet voters will never have a chance to send him to Sacramento.

The last time California held a governor’s race in which the front-runners from both parties were not either incumbents, celebrities or multimillionaires (in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s case in 2006, it was all three) was 1998. The streak will continue in 2010, because while Democratic hopeful Jerry Brown isn’t technically an incumbent, the fact that he served two terms as governor in the 1970s and 1980s gives him all the advantages of incumbency. In such an environment, mere public servants, no matter how experienced and competent, are going to find it hard to compete. Maybe it’s just coincidental that state government has been on a downhill slide since 1998.