Carly Fiorina
Cara Carleton "Carly" Fiorina (born September 6, 1954) is an American corporate mogul, former candidate for U.S. Senate from California, and a Republican Party candidate for President in 2016.
The Fiorina campaign states that Fiorina is uniquely able to take on and defeat Hillary Clinton, as the two candidates would have two breasts apiece, compared to none for anyone else in the race from either major party. However, the much more popular Donald Trump states that Fiorina's face is "ridiculous" for a would-be U.S. President. "Just look at it."
Early life
According to a glossy campaign brochure which "has not been approved or coordinated with any candidate or candidate's committee," and is thus due all the deference as if the Koch Brothers had signed it themselves, Fiorina was born in 1954 in Austin, Texas to Madelon Montross Jueregens and Joseph Tyree Sneed III. This would mean that she began life with a different name, although this is hardly as remarkable for a woman as it was for President Les King or Baz Soetero. The former never had to run for election (outside Grand Rapids, Michigan) and the latter had the media in the palm of his cocaine-stained hand.
What's-her-name's mother was an artist (in the same way that this author is an author) and her father was an up-and-coming law school professor who took the family around the world. Fiorina attended five different high schools, including one in Ghana, but none in Kenya and never claimed to be from any of those places, even to goose sales of an autobiography. Ultimately she graduated from a mundane high school in Durham, North Carolina.
After this game of musical desks, Fiorina attended Stanford University, where she majored in Medieval History. The Fiorina campaign notes that ISIS is galloping across the Middle East, seizing territory, raping prisoners before burning them alive, and vowing to return the world to the Middle Ages faster even than a John Kerry global warming treaty. The campaign states that it is vital to elect a President who actually studied primitive times, though from the safety of sidewalk cafés on El Camino Real.
After earning her degree, Fiorina did not proceed directly to the driver's seat of a taxi, like most college graduates in the Bay Area. Instead, she worked with a temporary employment agency called Kelly Girls, which fatefully placed her scrubbing floors at Hewlett-Packard.
After dabbling in law school and real estate, Fiorina got a business degree from Maryland — not indeed as relevant to modern government as her earlier study of the Medieval, but a fine calling card in its own right.
Corporate executive
Here, says the campaign brochure, is the key difference between Fiorina and Hillary Clinton. For whereas Clinton stayed in the same position (relative to Bill Clinton, at least), Fiorina moved from lowly sweeper to Chief Executive Officer, an unprecedented climb up the corporate ladder with only a token decade doing unrelated things on the opposite coast.
In the year 1999, women were being promoted to all sorts of jobs despite gaping lack of qualifications, though the American guilt complex had not advanced to the point of putting a shuck-and-jive Community Activist in the Oval Office. However, Fiorina notes that, in this wave of unqualified female executives, she was the unique, qualified female executive — the exception that proves the rule. Her naming as CEO set myriad records and fistfuls of firsts.
Hewlett-Packard at the turn of the century was woefully mismanaged, with its profits falling far short of Fiorina's expectations year after year. Gadflies in the trade press warned that the company was on its last leg. Fiorina reinvented the struggling tech giant, between bouts of re-purposing, re-visioning, and right-sizing, and with only a minimum of time spent in shameless self-promotion.
The decisions made by Fiorina transformed Hewlett-Packard from a laggard to a leader, going from 0% to 100% of females in the Chief Executive's office. The corporation is still pegging the needle at 100%, though current CEO Meg Whitman curiously refuses to attend Fiorina campaign events.
Slash-and-burn
In 2001, Fiorina had the boldest idea of all. Alone in Silicone Valley, she saw that there were too many computer companies. She proposed a merger of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, the same merger of equals that occurs when the reader encounters a juicy Red Delicious apple. Compaq at the time was still suffering indigestion from consuming Digital Equipment Corporation at a single sitting. Fiorina saw that both companies were in the identical business of manufacturing computers (which, incidentally, were usually incompatible) and lucrative synergy could be obtained by joining forces, meaning the engineering staffs — which, after a decade of cut-throat competition, hated one another. That would not be a problem, as staff would not be able to act out their base vendettas because they would be safely at the Unemployment Office.
Despite enraging employees, and baffling and frustrating customers with demands that they migrate to computer models that they had decided against, Fiorina revitalized Hewlett-Packard. Now annual revenues far exceeded Fiorina's expectations, when presented outside Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, and allowing for one-time charges for unanticipated expenses. Accountants permit these charges when it is clear they will not recur, and once you pay your people to go away, you obviously don't have to pay them a second time, unless they sue you. Hewlett-Packard earned astonishing revenue, per remaining employee. Fiorina put the entire company online, including herself, at which time she became known as iCarly.
Fiorina's rescue of Hewlett-Packard set the stage for a slaw of mergers in the Valley, as computer executives finally saw that their employees were their principal adversaries and vowed to eliminate their "dead-weight" engineering departments. Consensus was reached that America could make do with only one or two laptop manufacturers, and who knew they would both wind up in Korea?
Perennial candidate
In 2005, Fiorina's flurry of pink slips reached Fiorina herself. She left Hewlett-Packard because of illness, as the entire Board of Directors got sick of her, though not so sick as to not vote her a payment to go away that dwarfed any severance paid to an actual engineer.
After a few short years starting charities, sitting on other Boards of Directors, and just generally giving everyone a piece of her mind, Fiorina entered the Republican race for Governor of California.
2008 dalliance with McCain
Primary voters who are inspired by Fiorina's 2015 slogan to "take our country back," especially members of the Tea Party movement, paper over Fiorina's past in Republican politics, including her 2008 support of John McCain, who proved that nature abhors a vacuum more even than a Negro President. That year, Fiorina took the lead defending McCain's vice-presidential pick, Sarah Palin, claiming that her opponents were driven by class hatred — with no concept that that might be a two-edged sword someday. Fiorina allowed that Palin could never run a corporation like Hewlett-Packard, adding that "McCain couldn't either," as though Fiorina could. After these comments, the campaign did the police equivalent of taking Fiorina off the beat and giving her a desk job. Much was made that year of Palin's clothes-buying trips, but the campaign bought straitjackets in pairs.
2010 campaign for Governess
Fiorina's moles in the Tea Party movement likewise papered over her 2010 campaign for Governor of California, in which she was a straw to defeat two real Tea Party candidates: demon sheep Tom Campbell and state assemblyman Chuck DeVore, who targeted Californians with food fetishes. Fiorina devised remarkable fence-straddling, including beta-testing the line that Mitt Romney would use in 2012 — that, despite allegedly being "personally opposed" to abortion, a supposed libertarian streak would compel her never to do anything about it. Sarah Palin, who owed Fiorina a favor, agreed to appear at a Fiorina fundraiser shortly before the election, though big-name California Republicans [sic] stayed away, as Fiorina did too.
The campaign cost-reduced even more suddenly than Hewlett-Packard had, and by 52% to 42%, Californians got six more years of Barbara Boxer. One may argue they deserved it; unfortunately, the remaining 270 million Americans subject to the tender mercies of the Senate got her too. Fortunately, the Fiorina campaign's leftover debt is within industry baseline limits, when not subjected to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.
| 2010 California Governor | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Region | Why it voted against Fiorina | ||
| The North | Fiorina didn't look like a real man, while it was ambiguous in Boxer's case | ||
| Marin/Sacramento/Tahoe | Fiorina's vagueness on the Settled Science of global warming threatened ski weekends | ||
| Silicon Valley | Once burned, twice shy | ||
| Central Valley and desert | Fiorina attended few rallies, stating that "no one lives there" | ||
| Metro Hollywood | Decided Fiorina had a "ridiculous face" even before Trump did | ||
| San Diego and the South | No hablo inglés | ||
2016 campaign for President
With no sense of irony nor mention of the Peter Principle, Fiorina's backers asserted that, after abject failure to achieve statewide election, the only way left was upward, to fail to achieve nationwide election. Fiorina announced she would not run for California's other U.S. Senate seat in 2016, nor for Governor in 2018, clearing the decks for a run for President. She announced her candidacy in May 2015 in an ABC interview with George Stephanopoulus, who amazingly did not ask her whether the states have the constitutional power to ban the pill or to round up Japanese and put them in internment camps. Instead, Fiorina made the point that only she could make Hillary Clinton do something other than call Republicans sexist, or rather, to command Stephanopoulus to call them sexist.
Issues
Fiorina's claim to fame was zero-based budgeting, the idea that no agency would get money just because it got that many dollars the year before, combined with the idea that Fiorina could study what tens of thousands of departments got the year before and her competitors could not, combined with the idea that any department Fiorina wanted to get no dollars at all would go out of business without a whimper and spend no time trying to wrap her in scandal and treachery or make her fail. Whenever a televised debate turned to Obama-care or al-Qaeda or corruption at the IRS, Fiorina was able to shout about "zero-based budgeting" louder than the menfolk were shouting about the question the interviewer actually asked.
Regarding the IRS, Fiorina proposed to make all the tax forms fit onto three pages. This would make it possible to suck 40% of America's productivity into Washington, D.C. without any terrifying and arbitrary agency like the IRS. Fiorina did not state specific changes for the tax code, nor say who would be the "winners" and "losers," raising hopes that there might be no losers at all who would set themselves against this dramatic vision.
Wikipedia has dates and times of utterances that suggest that Fiorina has admitted that "global warming is real," which means she could be shamed into having America throw open the borders, tax itself to enable African nations to convert their transport to cow flatulence (at least between civil wars), and surrender to marauding Muslims sweeping through the countryside, on the basis that America despoiled their planet.
On the other hand, Fiorina has said there is nothing in the Constitution that allows the government to set a nationwide minimum wage, but everyone simply knows that that is settled law.
Fiorina set herself out as an inspiring counterpoint to current President Barack Obama. For example, Obama established a dialogue with Vladimir Putin, and the latter is now building military bases in Syria and fighting our wars, albeit with a slightly modified concept of who the enemy is and what the goal is. Fiorina declared, "I won't talk to Putin. I will act instead." Fiorina could get quick results by not talking to any foreign leader and by simply acting. Fortunately for Fiorina, modern Americans no longer accuse female candidates of being moody and acting on whims.
Strategy
Fiorina's strategy was to attend events dressed as Mister Woman and state that it is time to treat men and women equally. This was a hard sell to a nation that thought that electing Barack Obama would end the tedious National Dialogue On Race forever but could still smell the burning policemen.
Fiorina's equality-of-the-sexes schtick made her like a young Hillary Clinton with a degree in something other than Bimbo Eruptions, a perfect me-too female nominee for a party with a me-too health care plan and a me-too immigration amnesty plan. Fiorina claimed her womanhood made her Republicans' perfect antidote to Hillary, though this is somewhat like avoiding death-by-AIDS by contracting Ebola first.
Unfortunately, equality lasted only until the first time she could lecture an opponent on how All Wimmin feel about him. Fiorina attended debates with a spritzer filled not with throat balm but raw estrogen, which she kept herself slathered with. After the debate in December 2015, Iowa talk radio host Steve Deace twerked that Fiorina had gone into "full vagina" mode. The Fiorina campaign called Deace a crude sockpuppet of Ted Cruz, but the rest of the nation noted that there are no other types of Cruz sockpuppets.
That was the last word from the Fiorina campaign. Like Jeb Bush stating that Donald Trump is "a jerk," like Marco Rubio, the author of amnesty, sending anonymous postcards saying Cruz is unclean because he offered an amendment to amnesty, this promising campaign of an industrial titan ended with a whimper. Reacting to a troll made the campaign jump the rails and then jump the shark. It was never about equality, and probably not even about zero-based budgeting. It was about defeating Hillary Clinton by being a woman.
Curtain call
Nevertheless, politics is about nothing if not rattling around on the national scene forever. The one question that had made Fiorina lose her cool was, "Aren't you really running for Vice President?" — something she insisted no male candidate would ever be asked. However, as the Trump machine rolled through New York State and the delegate-count duct tape around Cruz began to approach the breathing holes, some of those same crude sockpuppets asked Fiorina if she wouldn't like to run for Vice President, and damned if she didn't agree, entering the plunging jetliner of the Cruz campaign through the emergency exit to enjoy the last five minutes of its flight.
The future
Given her failure in both a California political campaign and a national political campaign, the next step for Fiorina is obviously an international political campaign. This may take the following forms:
- The first female Pope of the Catholic Church. She will be able to insist that the budget of any parish have nothing to do with the money taken in on the collection plate the year before. While the Church could continue to oppose abortion, its true calling would change to, for instance, asserting that the Virgin Mary might have been the actual carpenter of the family.
- The Secretary General of the United Nations. She has proven expertise at uniting a staff of incompatibles, and a record of productive reorganization of underperforming institutions. In a few years, the world would consist of only five or six nations, or maybe just one, and you will be able to get low-wage workers without having to claim you tried to hire Americans first.
See also
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