The 7/12/2010 edition of the N.Y. Times featured a front-page story about Meg Whitman’s putting $1 million into a production company owned by Mike Murphy in order to get Murphy to handle her campaign for governor rather than that of a Republican  primary  rival.  In  the story Murphy is described as the GOP campaign genius who got Arnold  Schwarzenegger  elected governor.  (A confession:  I’d mistakenly thought Schwarzenegger had something to do with it.)    Left unnoted in the Times’ story (and obviously by Whitman’s crack human-resource team)  were such Murphy triumphs as Oliver North’s brilliant Virginia campaign  for the U.S. Senate, Lamar Alexander’s awe-inspiring campaign for president, and Nick Lazio’s dazzling  New York campaign for the U.S. Senate,  in which Lazio succeeded in making Hillary Clinton a sympathetic figure by following Murphy’s instructions to stalk across the debate stage and demand that Hillary sign a phony anti-tax  pledge.  (Lazio, incidentally, also lost.)   All of which leads me to ask, since Meg never tires of telling California voters what a shrewd businesswoman she is:  If the lady’s so rich, why ain’t she smart?