Politics & Power Quote by Meg Whitman

Meg Whitman’s line is the sound of a CEO learning to speak politics: half aspiration, half product pitch. The clunky aside - “you know” - isn’t just verbal clutter. It’s a tell. She’s trying to make a corporate-style promise (“make X famous for Y”) land in a civic arena where results are messy, credit is contested, and “famous” is an odd metric for governance.

The specific intent is bipartisan positioning with a California twist. In a state where partisan identity can feel predetermined, she reaches for a higher-status brand: competence. “Republicans and Democrats” is a deliberate pairing meant to signal she’s not auditioning to be a culture-war celebrity. She’s selling herself as the manager who can herd rival departments toward a single KPI: jobs staying put.

The subtext is anxiety about flight. “Keeping jobs in California” points to the perennial fear that companies will move to friendlier tax regimes or cheaper labor markets. She’s acknowledging that voters don’t just want job creation; they want job retention, the reassurance that the state isn’t bleeding opportunity to Texas, Nevada, or overseas. It also smuggles in a mild critique of Sacramento: if politicians became “famous” for this, it implies they currently aren’t.

Context matters: Whitman, a business leader stepping into public life, needed to translate boardroom credibility into a populist case. The line tries to reframe political success as measurable performance, offering a politics of deliverables over ideology. The irony is that “fame” is fleeting, but the economic forces she’s gesturing at are structural - and far less impressed by slogans than voters are.