Sooo, the latest entry in the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s “parade of losers” Leadership Series is Mrs. Carly Fiorina : “Our fourth instalment to the Leadership Series will be Mrs. Carly Fiorina on September 11, 2015, at 7:00 a.m., with introductory remarks by Governor Doug Ducey,” the ice cream man hired by Koch Industries to run their Southwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Arizona.
I warned you about Carly Fiorina earlier this year. Carly ‘demon sheep’ Fiorina is baaaaa-ck!:
God help us . . . Carly Fiorina was named one of the “worst CEOs of all time” for engineering HP’s controversial merger with Compaq, and had to be ousted by the board in 2005.
Fiorina later lost a senate race to incumbent Barbara Boxer from California in 2010, a campaign most noted for her bizarre Demon Sheep ads in the GOP primary against Tom Campbell.
This CEO from hell is now threatening to running for president. She’s b-a-a-a-a-a-ck! Carly Fiorina: ‘Worst Tech CEO’ Now Wants To Be President:
While many potential voters may be wondering who Carly Fiorina is, exactly, business analysts will quickly recall the former tech chief as one of the “worst CEOs of all time,” as she was often characterized following her six-year tenure at the head of the Silicon Valley giant.
According to reports from that time, Fiorina tripled her own salary while CEO of HP, while at the same time rendering about 30,000 of the company’s workers jobless in layoffs and firings while presiding over a 50 percent plunge in Hewlett-Packard stock value. Morale reportedly became so poor within the once-great technology firm that employees would openly boo Fiorina at company meetings.
But the seeming lack of respect between workers and Fiorina remains mutual, even a decade after she was given a $42 million “golden parachute” by HP in exchange for leaving the company.
As I have previously explained, this is the real reason Fiorina is running: she is going to take one for the GOP team by being the female attack dog — or demon sheep? — who viciously attacks Hillary Clinton, because the two dozen Republican men running for president do not want to be portrayed as misogynist sexist pigs. They can simply say “Carly said it,” and this will insulate them from the feckless Beltway media scrum that follows around presidential campaigns.
Fiorina did not fare well in early polling and did not qualify for the FAUX News debate “main event” last month. Fiorina was relegated to the “kiddie table debate” that no one, absolutely no one, actually watched.
The conservative media entertainment complex declared Fiorina the winner of the the “kiddie table debate” that no one saw, Google Declares Carly Fiorina Winner of ‘Kiddie Table’ GOP debate, because they need to have Fiorina in the debates to play the Mean Girl who viciously attacks Hillary Clinton, so the misogynist GOP male candidates can simply say “Carly said it,” but I repeat myself.
The right-wing noise machine’s harassment campaign paid off when TeaNN (formerly CNN), the host of the next GOP presidential primary debate, caved under pressure. CNN Changes Debate Criteria for Fiorina.
Albert Hunt at Bloomberg View recently wrote, Spotlight Holds Perils for Fiorina:
There is a strong desire in Republican circles for Carly Fiorina to be on the main stage in the next presidential debate.
Few in the party say Mrs. Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, has any chance of winning the nomination or even think she is the best candidate.
Instead, they argue that a party that has a problem with female voters can ill afford a sizable top-tier field that is exclusively middle-aged or older men. Moreover, they love her slashing attacks on Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom Mrs. Fiorina frequently calls a liar.
Mrs. Fiorina obviously would relish greater visibility, and her supporters anticipate that unlike in the first presidential debate, on Aug. 6, when she was on the undercard, she will be in the main event on Sept. 16.
If so, there will be a new level of scrutiny that she may not find altogether welcome.
There are two basic rationales for the Fiorina candidacy: She is not a politician, and she was a successful business executive who knows how to run the economy and has dealt with world leaders.
The trouble is, she was a politician. She ran for the Senate in California in 2010 and lost by more than a million votes to the incumbent, Barbara Boxer.
True, California is a Democratic state, but that was a banner year for Republicans, and Ms. Boxer has never been as popular a vote-getter as the state’s other Democratic senator, Dianne Feinstein.
During that campaign, Mrs. Fiorina was seen as smart but politically naïve. She displayed a tendency — one that remains evident in her presidential quest — to go into attack mode, which created sympathy, even some Republicans acknowledge, for the hard-edged Ms. Boxer.
But her central liability in that campaign was the qualification she held up as her chief asset: her experience as a high-level business executive.
Starting as a receptionist, she climbed the corporate ranks. In 1999, she was named chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, the renowned global technology company.
She was No. 1 in Fortune magazine’s first list of the most powerful women in business.
Not long after arriving at HP, she engineered the deal of the year, a huge acquisition of Compaq, the personal computer company.
That soon went south. Profits disappointed, the stock plummeted, she alienated the families of Hewlett- Packard’s founders, along with many employees, and she lost the confidence of the board of directors. In 2005, she was fired. She walked away with $42 million in severance, stock options and pension benefits, which could be hard to explain to voters struggling with jobs and stagnant wages.
She still insists that she was a victim of a “boardroom brawl” and dismisses criticism of her record. She says the company doubled in size and added jobs on her watch. That is true, but only because of the Compaq acquisition, which many analysts consider a catastrophe. The company is now splitting into two divisions. Mrs. Fiorina usually dismisses criticism of her claims of success as partisan or politically motivated.
She also boasts of her international experience, claiming she has dealt with more heads of state than any candidate other than Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state, and that she understands President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Yet many of her international meetings were with business groups; she had one rather short one-on-one session with Mr. Putin in 2001.
Mrs. Fiorina, 60, has an appealing story beyond her rise in business. She is a breast cancer survivor, and is admirably transparent about the death of her stepdaughter from drug abuse and has committed herself to fighting this scourge.
And if she gets on the big stage, she might be the one to go toe to toe with Donald Trump, who often disparages women, including Mrs. Fiorina.
Examples: Donald Trump blasts Carly Fiorina’s qualifications for president, Trump to Fiorina: You’re Already Fired!, and this from the Twitter troll:
Nonetheless, her two chief calling cards — as a successful business executive and a nonpolitician — may create more problems than opportunities.
I disagree with Mr. Hunt and other pundits who are speculating that Fiorina is in the TeaNN debate to take “The Donald” down a peg or two. Fiorina has one job, and one job only: to be the Mean Girl who viciously attacks Hillary Clinton. She is a political opportunist. Fiorina will take one for the team and play her role in the hope of being considered for a VP slot or cabinet secretary post from the eventual GOP nominee — unless, of course, it is Donald Trump.
