Meanwhile, over in California...

Amid a debate about jobs, and I'm late to this, but Meg Whitman, a Mitt Romney backer and donor whose 2010 bid for California governor failed and is now the head of Hewlett-Packard, announced in the last two weeks that she has to cut 30,000 jobs at the company, with slots in high-growth China probably avoiding the axe.

Whitman, one of Romney's national finance co-chairs and a major donor, won praise from the former Massachusetts governor in a National Review interview, which ran the day of the New York Times report on HP last week, in which he said he wished the red ink-infested Golden State had elected her governor.

But the HP situation is a reminder of why business credentials can cut both ways in a campaign, especially in a year that's focused on the economy. Whitman, who saw her eBay tenure picked over while she was running her own campaign, is still generally highly-regarded in Silicon Valley and in business circles.

Yet job cutbacks can be the flip side of a business, especially in a struggling economy. And Whitman's own difficulties seem likely to be a ripe opportunity for Democrats to argue that even a top Romney surrogate hasn't been able to prevent losses, at a time when the presidential hopeful is citing his private sector tenure as his main criteria for being able to fix the nation's economy.

Maggie Haberman is senior political reporter for Politico.