Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who did not even register as a Republican until 2007, has officially declared her intent to run for governor of California.

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.