CA: E-Meg's E-Campaign

Ken McLaughlin reports at The San Jose Mercury News:

The telephone rings and Meg Whitman, the Republican candidate for governor, is greeting you by your first name. You flip on the TV, and there she is again on a new kind of interactive ad that lets you order a free Meg 2010 bumper sticker with the push of a few buttons on your remote control.

Surf on over to Whitman's flashy website and, with the click of your mouse, voilà, it's "Meg 2010: Una Nueva California" — the whole site is translated into Spanish. Click again and it's in Chinese.

The former eBay CEO's carpet-bombing of the airwaves generated the most political buzz during her $80 million march to victory over Steve Poizner in the GOP primary. But behind the scenes, her campaign served as a laboratory for new technology that will be unleashed against her Democratic rival, Jerry Brown, in the months leading up to the Nov. 2 election.

A glimpse into Whitman's tech spending is startling: The latest campaign expenditure reports show she had spent $2.7 million through May 22 on website development and information technology alone — seven times more than Brown spent on his entire campaign.