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Romney Cites Businesswoman Who Presided Over Huge Losses And Job Cuts As Model For His Cabinet

During an interview published on Monday by Politico, Mitt Romney praised one of his favorite business leaders, Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman. According to Politico, Romney said that his cabinet “would be dominated by people from the private sector, citing Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard as a model for female leaders he would like to surround himself with.”

This isn’t the first time that Romney has pointed to Whitman — who is also the former CEO of Ebay and a former California gubernatorial candidate — as a leader to emulate. But at the moment, Whitman is presiding over a company in free-fall. HP just suffered its largest quarterly loss ever and is shedding tens of thousands of jobs:

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) posted a record (HPQ) quarterly loss and reported slumping sales for personal computers and services aimed at businesses, underscoring the turnaround challenge facing Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman.

The fiscal third-quarter loss of $8.86 billion includes a writedown for the enterprise-services unit and reflects a 10 percent decline in PC revenue…Whitman is cutting 27,000 jobs over two years.

During her unsuccessful 2010 run for California’s governorship, Whitman released a slew of half-baked economic plans. These included a proposal to balance the Golden State’s budget that, according to a ThinkProgress analysis, wouldn’t come anywhere close to actually balancing the budget.

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While at Ebay, Whitman succeeded in boosting net income, but eventually left the company crippled due to disastrous acquisitions: “A year after Whitman bailed on eBay, the stock had sunk so low that employees were left holding onto stock options that would actually cost more than than eBay’s market stock price, making them worse than worthless.” Before moving to Ebay, Whitman was CEO of FTD.com, where she oversaw a fifty percent drop in business during her two-year tenure. And evidently this is the sort of experience Romney would like to bring to the federal government.