That's right, Meg Whitman. The former eBay CEO made the magazine's "50 Most Powerful Women in Business" list three years running; even after leaving eBay, she finagled a place on last year's "Highest-paid women" list. This year, she's nowhere: Not on Most Powerful, not on Highest-Paid, not even on "10 Global leaders" or "The D.C. power list." And she's been given just 20 minutes at the very end of Fortune's conference. Whitman's already skipped one full-fledged debate; now she skipping another event so she can make a minor appearance tied to a magazine she's not even in. Scared of your public much?

Come on Meg, it's not as hard as it looks. Consider who's doing the job now!

The event in question, a forum being put on by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, will bring all the big gubernatorial candidates, including Gavin Newsom, a conversation on the state's many, many problems and how to fix them. Sadly for those who support the right-wing Whitman, she's going to be too busy at Fortune Magazine's "Most Powerful Women" Summit.

Sure, she helped John McCain last year, he's helping her and she knows how to be a flip-flopping demagogue, but that doesn't mean she's ready for the big leagues. She's already missed at least one event: a debate at the Sacramento Press Club. And she hasn't yet sent her RSVP for an October debate. Her flack insists she will participate in some debates down the line and stressed that she's holding "Meet Meg" events around the state, like one where she spoke at Yahoo's offices.

Good grief, these media mavens mulling public office sure are messy. Yes, we're talking about you, Carly Fiorina.

Although, seriously, if Meg Whitman wants to blend into the state's political scene, she needs to stop trying to separate herself from the pack. People trust politicians who can play the game. And that means playing with others. But, what do we know? We're just computer geeks — a group that has no place in politics whatsoever, right?

Whitman's support for a 2008 anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative became a hot topic at a recent gathering of high-profile Silicon Valley women, the sort of crowd from whom Whitman would eventually like to raise money. The conversation inevitably turned to Whitman's gay marriage stance. One guest — we hear it was All Things D editor Kara Swisher, a longtime Wall Street Journal tech reporter, but haven't been able to confirm with Swisher — grilled the Republican candidate on why her lesbian family should be second class:

'I have children who are unprotected... I pay taxes just like you. Why do you get more rights than I do?' "

In the past, Whitman's campaign spokesman has parried questions like these, emphasizing Whitman's support for civil unions. On her own, Whitman took things a step further, her interrogator told the San Francisco Chronicle:

"Whitman said, 'You know, I just wish we could have one term for everything: civil unions,' I said, 'Bingo, sold, I'll take it.' "

But Whitman quickly backed down from the idea of making civil unions the sole relationship recognized by the state. According to her questioner, Whitman

"wouldn't say anything. ... She wouldn't say yes. ... She would not say, 'OK, I will do that.' " ([The Chronicle's] own efforts to get confirmation from Whitman's campaign team, in preparation for this item, failed. Calls were not returned).

At eBay, Whitman took on the image of a tolerant social liberal; after cozying up to Republicans Mitt Romney and John McCain in 2008 she came out against gay marriage. At a gathering in socially liberal Northern California, she said the government should get out of the marriage business; when the San Francisco Chronicle called to confirm, she couldn't be pinned down.

With a consistent statement on gay marriage, Whitman could cultivate California's social conservatives or its social liberal, and maybe win over enough moderates to become governor. With all this flip flopping, though, she just looks as confused as the trainwreck political party she's attached herself too, rather than one of its rising stars.

[SF Chronicle]

Fiorina voted in just 5 of the 18 elections since 2000, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. That's even worse than former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, the Republican gubernatorial hopeful who, you'll recall, voted in 6 of 13 elections over five years (46 percent turnout versus 28 percent for Fiorina).

That's the trouble with dallying in politics: Your past apathy comes back to haunt you. Except maybe in open-minded California, where movie star Arnold Shwarzenegger failed to vote in five of 11 elections but still won election as governor a landslide. The question for Fiorina and Whitman is whether Californians have learned their lesson (probably not).

Despite her stature in the tech industry, Whitman is "little recognized" statewide, as the Associated Press puts it. Her speech at the Republican National Convention bombed; she's not much of a voter; and then there's the issue of her seeming flip-flop on gay rights.

But she went to bat for two Republican presidential candidates in the last election, raising money for Mitt Romney and then co-chairing McCain's campaign. Both failed Republican presidential candidates have now endorsed her in the governor's race, as has former California Gov. Pete Wilson, lending her the support of party heavy hitters her opponents lack.

McCain, who touted Whitman as a potential Treasury Secretary during his presidential campaign, is a natural supporter of her campaign. But his support for her has the side effect of creating a new name to rival Sarah Palin, the former running mate McCain's has noticeably snubbed on recent occasions. Palin might not be on McCain's list of Republican "rising stars," but it's a safe bet that Whitman now is — much to her own good fortune.

Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO and noted gay-marriage opponent, is vying to be the Republican candidate for governor in California's 2010 election. She might well face one of her former lieutenants, Steve Westly, who left eBay to run for state controller, a post he won in 2002; he previously ran as a Democratic candidate for governor in 2006, but lost in the primary.

Or she might contend with Gavin Newsom, the tech-friendly mayor of San Francisco, who has courted the chiefs of Google, Twitter, and Facebook in launching his run. (Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin ferried guests to Newsom's wedding last year in their private jet.)

It's a turnabout for Northern California, which has long been noted for funding campaigns, not launching them. Will the nerd candidates play in California's conservative Central Valley, or glitzy Hollywood? Kelly has one advantage: He knows all about building a social network.

MSNBC commentator Dan Abrams inveighed against the horrors of the "mainstream media."

ABC's John Berman played Captain Phillips to his apartment's Somali-pirate rodents.

Techmeme editrix Megan McCarthy questioned California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman's competence.

Web 3.0 fanboy Alan Meckler gave Twitter "big ups."

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley mooched off of ex-employer Google again.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Watch how Whitman dude Mitch Zak, a Republican operative, interrupted a perfectly nice ladychat between ladyblog WowOwow's Randi Bernfeld and Whitman ladyfundraiser Jillian Manus to explain Whitman's stance on Proposition 8, California's gay marriage ban which voters passed last November:

Randi: I'm a little confused about one issue: Regarding Whitman's stance on Proposition 8 and gay marriage. She is against gay marriage but supports civil unions. Can you speak on that?


Mitch: I can help you on that one. Yes, she voted for Proposition 8, and to her that was a matter of her faith and her personal convictions. She does believe the term "marriage" should belong to the union of a man and a woman. But that said, she is absolutely a strong supporter of civil unions and it's evident by her leadership at eBay. It was tremendously inclusive in that regard. The one other distinction that she made is that the folks who were legally married when the law was in California, those folks should stay married.

Randi: I see.

Mitch: So it's not their fault that the law was what it was.

Many of eBay's numerous gay and lesbian employees are still steaming over Whitman's newfound opposition to same-sex marriage, which they believe has more to do with political opportunism than Whitman's religious faith, something she never mentioned even to close workplace confidants in her years at eBay. And it's hardly a popular cause among the demographic Manus, chair of Whitman's Women's Coalition, will target: White women opposed Proposition 8, 53 percent to 47 percent. That's probably Whitman's best defense for continuing to claim that her opposition to gay marriage is a matter of personal faith, not political expediency: It doesn't seem like a sure-fire vote-getter.

She tells Fortune that she might spend $50 million of her own money on the campaign. That figure daunts even Jerry Brown, the state attorney general who's running for a second stint as governor: "That's a lot!"

But what does she bring besides money? The article glosses over her spotty voting record — she voted in less than half of the past 10 year's elections. And it also gives her a pass on her opposition to gay marriage. That position, in particular, has enraged natural supporters inside eBay and around the Bay Area, where a business conservative might otherwise hope to win crossover votes. (Puzzle this one out: Whitman's longtime assistant at eBay, Anita Gaeta, is a lesbian who lives with her partner in San Jose, and is working with her on the campaign.)

Whitman's fundamental mistake seems to be thinking that the decisiveness she displayed as eBay's CEO will translate into governance. Hold on a second. Was Whitman that great a CEO, beyond eBay's first few years, when the startup was fueled by the strength of founder Pierre Omidyar's idea of an online auction?

She made several bad mistakes in the second half of her career at eBay: buying the voice-over-Internet startup Skype for $2.6 billion; enraging eBay's sellers by hiking fees; and putting a revolving door of leaders through PayPal, the company's online service, which eBay is only now focusing on as a growth engine.

So, let's review: This is a person who engaged in wasteful spending, raised eBay's equivalent of taxes, and squandered opportunities for growth.

"Being CEO of the state is not a popularity contest," she says. Well, actually, last time we checked, getting the job was. Whitman had better start trying being popular, because running on her business record seems like a non-starter.

The appearance instantly highlighted why Whitman's unfit for a run at public office: She's boring! Sycophantic underlings and starry-eyed business journalists may have been willing to hang on her every word, but political reporters have sharper elbows. Whitman has hired Arnold Schwarzenegger's political strategists, and she stayed strictly on message. But she had better hope no one looks too closely at her record of achievement at eBay.

She talks about the 1.3 million jobs she "created" among people making their business selling goods on eBay. But most of those people were already in business, and just found a new sales outlet on eBay. How did Whitman help them? By raising listing fees and forcing them to use eBay's PayPal, increasing her company's cut of their sales. She also overpaid for acquisitions, including $2.6 billion on Skype, a voice-over-Internet startup which had little to do with the rest of eBay's business.

Her career as eBay's CEO, in other words, looks like that of a tax-and-spend liberal. A spokesman for Whitman characterized her as "retired and bored" just a few months ago. Any bets on how long before this quixotic attempt at politics, fueled by her $1.4 billion eBay fortune, ends with her being retired and bored once more?

Here's her full appearance on the show:

"Jobs" remix by Gawker video intern Bill Zilla)

In her quest for political power, she has gone through a puzzling makeover. She first entered politics as the finance cochair for Mitt Romney's GOP presidential campaign, and then threw her support behind John McCain when Romney dropped out. McCain gave her a primetime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention (where she bombed). And she has now assembled a team of campaigns veterans who worked with Romney, George W. Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

They will surely try to position her a centrist, business-friendly replacement for Schwarzenegger. But she is hardly that. Her support of Proposition 8, California's gay-marriage ban, has embittered many natural supporters in her home turf of northern California. Gay eBay employees, an influential group within the company, are especially furious at her betrayal. The new fees eBay pushed on sellers have tarnished her image as a friend of small businesses. And her failure to secure key domain names like meg2010.com, combined with her failed attempt to reclaim them from the man who registered them, hardly makes her seem tech-savvy.

Outside of the Bay Area, she is a virtual unknown; two-thirds of California voters have no opinion of her. Hence the soft-focus photo on her campaign homepage. Who is Meg Whitman? At this point, people who worked for her for years say they don't know. Perhaps that makes her the perfect political candidate: a blank slate of ambition, free of core beliefs, on whom political consultants can write whatever it takes to get elected.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, can't run again because of California's term-limits laws, which means the 2010 race to replace the Governator is wide open on both sides — the only kind of scenario in which a political novice like Whitman might even consider running for office. (She could even face a former employee: Steve Westly, an eBay executive who won election as California's state controller in 2002, is a Democratic contender.)

Why won't Whitman just come out and say she's running as a Republican candidate? Her off-again, on-again efforts are increasingly bizarre. She didn't even register as a party member until 2007, when she started working on Mitt Romney's doomed campaign. She then staked out a far-right position on gay marriage, at odds with eBay's HR practices. She has yet to form an exploratory committee, a necessary step before she can start raising money for the 2010 election.

And yet she is taking vigorous action against a California businessman who registered several domain names related to a Whitman gubernatorial campaign. Henry Gomez, a former eBay executive who now serves as her spokesman, offered the lamest possible explanation for the effort: "We're retired. We're bored."

Whitman must be even more restless, now that she's quit her corporate boards. But her pseudocampaign is off to a rocky start. She hired Republican operative Steve Schmidt, who ran campaigns for George Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and John McCain, last fall — but he quietly quit the Whitman effort in December. One step forward, one step back. She's not even running, and yet Whitman's finding politics much harder than business.

(Photo by Getty Images)

Whitman, as we've noted, is an oddity among Silicon Valley Republicans, who tend to worry more about lower taxes than hot-button social issues like abortion and gay marriage. In the Republican presidential primaries, she supported Mitt Romney, a Mormon with conservative social views. But it wasn't until recently that Whitman started talking about her own support for Proposition 8, California's recently passed ban on same-sex marriages.

Henry Gomez, the former eBay superflack who's serving as an advisor to Whitman, told me this week that Whitman's stand was "a personal issue." Many gay eBay employees agree. They see Whitman's stance as a deeply personal betrayal. As the CEO of a company in a liberal industry in a liberal region, Whitman never gave a hint that she didn't value gay and lesbian employees' relationships. It turns out she was just being politic.

Whitman's longtime executive assistant, Anita Gaeta, is a lesbian, who owns a house with her partner in San Jose. I tried to contact Gaeta to get her views on the matter, but she did not respond. Gomez tells me Gaeta continues to work for Whitman.

But leave personal feelings aside. As a practical matter, Whitman's support of Proposition 8 may backfire in fundraising and in the general election. Several current and former eBay executives, including founder Pierre Omidyar, lent their name to a newspaper advertisement opposing Proposition 8. Will they support Whitman's campaign now? Unlikely.

Her stance could also hurt her former employer's business. Already, eBay sellers are organizing a boycott because of Whitman's stance. And no company likes to be drawn into controversial causes. One might think that her handpicked successor, John Donahoe, might prevail on Whitman to moderate her stance for that reason alone.

California prefers its Republicans to be centrists — Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, another Proposition 8 opponent, is the best example of this trend. Whitman's top two contenders, former Representative Tom Campbell and Steve Poizner, the state's insurance commissioner, also opposed the proposition.

It all seems ill thought out — rather like Whitman's quixotic legal campaign to reclaim a set of domain names she failed to register before talk of her gubernatorial prospects became public. The sight of a tech billionaire harassing the small businessman who registered them are provoking giggles among California's Republicans.

Which is probably the right reaction to Whitman's stance on Proposition 8: not anger, but pity. Insulated by sycophantic advisors and accustomed to fawning coverage from a supine tech press corps, Whitman must not even realize what a joke her would-be political career is.

Whitman is widely talked about as a Republican candidate for California's governorship in 2010. But she hasn't even been able to win a set of domain names related to a potential campaign, like whitman2010.com. A Southern California man, Thomas Hall, registered that URL and four others. Whitman's legal team has spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to get them back. But an arbitrator at the World Intellectual Property Organization, which rules on such matters, has denied her complaint. Why?

Because Whitman, the ruling argues, hasn't established herself as a brand in the marketplace. This despite appearing on the cover of Fortune and speaking to thousands at eBay seller conferences. Her microfame, in isolated little worlds like Silicon Valley and the online-auction universe, hasn't carried over — at least not enough to impress impartial bureaucrats a world away.

Should Whitman forget about politics, based on this domain-name defeat? Yes, but that's not the only reason. She hopes to trade on her reputation in business, but that's been thoroughly tarnished by eBay's stagnation in the latter years of her reign. Spending $2.6 billion on Skype, and then writing most of it off, was thoroughly boneheaded; meanwhile, she worried about Google but failed to see the threat from a resurgent Amazon.com.

Hey, we hear Yahoo's looking for a CEO! A fixer-upper might be just what Whitman needs, since her good name is in need of repairs, too. Maybe then she'll be able to sell it on a ballot.

Update: Henry Gomez, a retired eBay executive who's now working with Whitman as her personal spokesman, called to say Whitman plans to sue Hall under U.S. cybersquatting laws. (There's no appeal available for the WIPO ruling.) I chatted with Gomez, who seemed to know quite a bit about California politics and electoral rules. How, I asked, did he come across this knowledge? And why is Whitman so concerned about reclaiming these domains, when she's not even offically running for governor? "What can I say?" said Gomez. "We're retired. We're bored."

Apple, where cofounder Steve Jobs returned to power in 1998, is up 600 percent since the beginning of 2002. Amazon.com, where Jeff Bezos has reigned as CEO more or less uninterruptedly since the online retailer's founding, tripled its worth. Google, where cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin form a troika with hired-hand CEO Eric Schmidt, has also tripled in value since its inital public offering in 2004. These gains remain despite the stock market's punishing fall.

What about Yahoo, eBay, and Microsoft, where founders handed over the company to professional managers? They are all back where they started almost seven years ago. Under former CEO Terry Semel, Yahoo had a brief golden age in 2004, where it outperformed all the other big Internet companies; it ended just as Google began its relentless rise. Meg Whitman overstayed her welcome at eBay, presiding over its stagnation before handing over the CEO job to John Donahoe — like Whitman, also a management consultant by training. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has proven that he's no Bill Gates; the stock has flatlined under his leadership.

Under Yang, the stock has gone down, down, down, interrupted only by the hope that Microsoft might buy the company and in so doing, give its employees the leadership and sense of purpose they so desperately crave. Does that disprove the value of founders? No. Rather, it suggests that by abandoning his company when it was merely a toddler to be reared by strangers, that he was never much of a father figure to begin with.

There are, nevertheless, some possibilities.

One is former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who has been toying with entering politics. eBay and Yahoo have long flirted with a merger, so she's reasonably familiar with the company, and with the challenges of running a large Internet company.

A similar candidate: Jon Miller, the former CEO of AOL, who is now a partner at Velocity Interactive Group, a venture-capital firm. Money is tight in venture capital, and Velocity has yet to raise a promised new fund in the multiple hundreds of millions of dollars it had planned for when he joined it. Yet Miller has a problem: Time Warner, the parent of AOL, used his noncompete agreement to prevent him from joining Yahoo's board; it's not clear why they would waive it to let him become CEO. The agreement does not expire until next spring.

News Corp. COO Peter Chernin does not seem to have much hope of succeeding Rupert Murdoch as CEO, who is expected to hand the media conglomerate over to one of his children instead. But he does not have a credible claim for having much online experience — overseeing MySpace is the best he can do there.

And lastly, as a courtesy, Yahoo's president, Sue Decker, is under consideration. Some say Decker's Machiavellian maneuverings helped out former Hollywood studio boss Terry Semel as CEO last summer. But she's seen inside and outside the company as a bad manager who lacks a vision for what Yahoo should be.

More:

• 5 reasons why Jerry Yang is done at Yahoo
• Jerry Yang's goodbye letter to Yahoo
• Yahoos quietly cheer Yang's exit
• Newsweek reporter: Yahoo PR "lying sacks of s—-"

But we're not. A source told us it's being held at the rented mansion of Facebook board member Peter Thiel, the former PayPal CEO and founder of Clarium Capital, a hedge fund. Thiel backed Ron Paul in the primaries, but what we really want to know is: What is the gay investor's position on California's proposed gay-marriage ban? Festivities start at 6 p.m. Oh, need directions? Thiel is listed in the phone book.

Update: Lead21 chair Sonia Arrison writes:

Just thought I'd let you know that your information source for the location of the Lead21 election party was wrong. It is not at Peter Thiel's home, but it is at a location in the same general area.

If I find out more, I'll let you know.

(Photo by Eric Eldon/VentureBeat)