Carly Fiorina wears well
I’ve come to the conclusion that Carly Fiorina is the sort of person where the more you hear, the more you like. Her manner is exceptionally composed, unruffled. She criticizes without undue polemics, and yet she manages to be hard-hitting. She doesn’t flinch from questions, and although her answers are careful and measured they don’t come across as the usual self-serving, mendacious, political claptrap.
In short, I think she will be getting more attention as time goes on—and not just because the fact that she’s a women makes her an excellent counter to Hillary Clinton.
I like what I’ve heard her say.
At last, a real woman candidate who has real accomplishments in the private sector and can campaign on something other than the fact that she has a vagina.
The MSM is going to go after her in a way that will make what they did to Palin look mild. Bet on it.
I like her, too. She comes across as real, smart and unflappable. I like that she goes after Hillary with all guns blazing. I’d rather see this from potential nominees than have the nominees go after each other (that never made any sense to me). The only thing I am not clear on are her positions on major items. But for now, I am satisfied just seeing what kind of campaign she would run, and right now it’s pretty awesome!
Saw her this AM on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
She was excellent; as usual.
And at the end of the interview she does this natural and nearly girlish shrug of the shoulders and little laugh.
She has a near perfect manner and is smart as a whip. Fresh approach too. And she constantly hammers the fact that 82% of Americans are sick of the political class.
Carleton Sneed Fiorina is not of the political class.
Over at Powerline, Paul has a nice piece about HRC’s theme that she is a fighter. Fighting who over what?
Carly rose from secretary to Fortune 500 CEO. She was fired from her CEO job, has been divorced, lost a step-daughter to drugs, lost an election and had cancer. She also earned her $58m adding value for customers and shareholders. She didn’t give talks to rent seekers in return for favors.
I like her. Bunches.
I am campaigning to see Carly speak at Carleton College. Carleton at Carleton would be a hit. She would wake up those young libs and win some votes.
I agree. I watched her field questions during the center seat segment on Special Report. She was excellent!
Incredibly expository answers. She puts every other candidate to shame… and their own well merited subclass — the idiot class that had poorly memorized their platitudes and talking points. Now, on the other hand, and not altogether fairly, I’ll admit, is this: will she make the proper connections, i.e., connect all the dots? The first answer, relating to jobs and global competition for them, does not connect to the dot ‘immigration’ (legal and illegal although it is fundamentally applicable to the situation. If she will connect all the dots on this and other issues, I may give her a hearing I had not given any candidate for thirty years. If, further, she does not kowtow and apologize for PoCo (as in loco) sensibilities, and further yet, if she makes an issue of the MSM and their perduring bias, then I may have to look her up and not depend on serendipitous encounters. Still, a lot of ifs.
I think Fiorina’s smart as a whip, and I especially like her strong pro-life stand. But I wonder if she has something of a “bitchy” problem among women. The left’s already starting to play on that, reminding us to “never forget the time Carly Fiorina called Barbara Boxer’s hair ‘so yesterday’.
Maybe she should gain a few pounds and go for the gemé¼tlich look Hillary’s adopted — along with most other female leaders of government worldwide, it seems.
COURIC: So, what is your position on abortion though? Your — as a candidate?
FIORINA: I’m a pro-life candidate because I believe that science is proving us right every day.
Carly Fiorina: “If You Came Here Illegally, You Don’t Get A Path To Citizenship”
“Our nation was intended to be a citizen government,” Fiorina told host George Stephanopoulos. “Somehow we’ve come to this place in our nation’s history where we think we need a professional political class. I don’t believe that, and I will tell you, as I’ve been out there across the country, people don’t believe that either. They’re kinda tired of the political class, and they believe we need to return to a citizen government.”
Fiorina; “every single Republican candidate has been asked about their vote for the war in Iraq. The one person who’s not been asked that question, because she won’t answer the question, is Hillary Clinton. The one person who was on the job in 2011 when Iraq started to fall apart was not the Republican nominees or candidates for president, it’s Hillary Clinton. She hasn’t been asked yet. What would she do now Iraq?”
Fiorina; “We must have the strongest military on the face of the planet, and everyone has to know it. And that means that we not only have, need the number of carriers required, but we also have to have the strongest capabilities against cyberwarfare, against asymmetric warfare, all of these threats that face us. Of course, we have to have the wisdom to know when not to use that force. But my goodness, we also have to have the courage to know when to use it. And in particular, we need to understand that every problem represents an opportunity.”
I love her positive attitude about the first Fox GOP debate: Rather than complaining about the 10-candidate “cut”, she calmly and confidently expresses her belief that she will make that cut. Makes one want to root for her. She’s certainly made me hope/believe that she will make the cut.
The lady exudes leadership.
Very impressive.
If she gains too much traction the negative campaigning against her will become brutal. I fear that the public will buy into the narrative that she was fired at HP (ignorant though they may be of the dynamic), and lost her one venture into politics, even though beating a Democrat incumbent in California, even the intellectually challenged Barbara Boxer, is nigh impossible.
However, she is not Sarah Palin. She is cooler, and more cerebral. No one can paint her as the hick from Wasilla.
I think she could beat Hillary because she is capable of punching back hard, and can’t be characterized as a chauvinistic bully when she does. I really don’t think Hillary can take a punch.
I would love to see her on the ticket. I really doubt that she could win the GOP nomination. I wonder if she would accept the second position?
Just watched Jeb Bush’s announcement. He sounded good and he has a massive organization and huge campaign coffer. He will be hard to beat unless he stumbles. Not my first choice, but I could live with it.
carl wrote: “The lady exudes leadership.”
Exactly. She would make a great President.
I see a woman, but for everything other than dating and a few gender-specific differences, including political representation, I see a person.
She’s the CLASSIC Queen Bee type of corporate success story.
Pretty much everything she touches is going to work out.
AFTER she was terminated by HP’s board — her successor admitted — less than two years later — that Fiorina had saved HP from bankruptcy/ failure in the marketplace.
She soft-pedalled her HP days, for she was able to out fox the MSFT-Dell trust.
That’s a story yet to be told.
She obviously leveraged HP’s image processing technologies to gain a seat at the BIG TABLE with the NSA and the rest of the intelligence state. Gates and Dell had no counter to her play.
Besides what others have said, and adding to blert’s observations, one thing that struck me about her ‘center seat’ interview was her use of the word “we”. “We did” in reference to her accomplishments at HP. She never once took credit for what she did. I hear so little of that in the corporate world, it was a breath of fresh air, and said more about her character than she could have said in a speech. And she’s given some exceptionally good ones.
She’s a leader and a team builder. Exactly the kind of person you want for boss, CEO, and if you’re lucky enough, president.
I have been very impressed.
But wait for the hiccups: Did she serve in the military? What foreign policy experience has she?
As if these things matter.
Will she do the right thing(s)? I think YES.
I also think YES of Carson and Walker and Cruz.
But wait! Jeb’s in! Golly Jee Whiz!
I dream of a debate between her and Madame Hillary.
One hour of Carly on Hannity this Friday.
The media grilled her about the board firing her as CEO of HP so many years ago.
I’m not sure if that was a catalyst for something later, but her methodology has changed when it comes to dealing with the MSewerM.
I’ll join the chorus as a Fiorina admirer. In a field of smart, well-spoken (well, mostly), talented people she seems to be in the very top tier.
Geoffrey Britain quoting Fiorina: “The one person who was on the job in 2011 when Iraq started to fall apart was not the Republican nominees or candidates for president, it’s Hillary Clinton.”
Good direction. Shining the critical spotlight on Clinton’s record as Secretary of State during the critical stage for post-Surge Iraq emphasizes that Bush handed a stabilized progressing Iraq to Obama. See:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/hillary-clinton/11536590/Ex-British-diplomat-accuses-Hillary-Clinton-of-role-in-meltdown-of-Iraq.html
and
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/robert-gates-former-defense-secretary-offers-harsh-critique-of-obamas-leadership-in-duty/2014/01/07/6a6915b2-77cb-11e3-b1c5-739e63e9c9a7_story.html?hpid=z1
In contrast, criticizing Clinton for her correct vote as Senator for the 2002 AUMF boosts the Left narrative that Bush’s decision for Operation Iraqi Freedom was a mistake.
Yeah it’s time for a woman to be President.just not Hillary. Carly may be an American Margaret Thacker.An American Iron Lady
Fiorina will have a hard time getting past the ‘she fired employees for corporate profits’ meme. While what she did was correct from a business standpoint, we have to remember that to the left, corporations are not there to make a profit, corporations are there so someone can have a job irrespective of whether that job actually benefits the corporation and shareholders.
How Fiorina would get me on her bandwagon is for her to describe how she, as a businesswoman, would trim the bloated monster that is .gov employment. I also need to hear her, or any candidate that wants my vote, explicitly state that illegal aliens in this country are criminals by virtue of being here illegally, needing to be removed; then they can go to the back of the line and apply for legal entry. No more cutesie ‘undocumented immigrant’ phrasing of this most serious issue. I’ll also vote for the first candidate to expressly state that Mexico is waging war on us by virtue of invading us with their social problems. Or I’ll vote for the first candidate to state unequivocally that the US is not the welfare capital of the world.
RickZ
Just finished Ann Coulter’s book. Read it. A shocker.
Here’s a tease. Coulter presents good evidence that there are 30m illegals here; that’s about 10% of the U.S. population. One quarter of Mexico’s population is here.
And she documents the illegal crime wave. Americans are being brutally murdered and raped by people who shouldn’t be here. The “mass incarceration” allegation goes away if illegals weren’t here.
A couple of things more — nobody who makes it to CEO of a major company is a stranger to politics, and in Fiorina’s case, getting there from secretary would make her one of the rarest and clever women in the country. So her abiilities as THE Hillary Slayer are immense. She is everything Hillary isn’t. The tragedy for all women is how little attention she gets for her accomplishments. The media who are obsesseed with strong women, ignore the very embodiment of their ideal woman in Fiorina, and try to prop up the myth that Hillary is cut from the same cloth, all to protect a political image. Fiorina is in the right marketing campaign a “true” fairy tale for not just women, but anyone who starts out from not much and makes it on their own merit. She and Rubio are the American dream – living proof of what oiur parents told us was possible.
If I’m right about Fiorina, the Republicans would be insane not to realize she’s one of the rare candidates who can punch through media bias and get her message across. They’ve been handed a gift, and hopefully they won’t toss it aside in favor of a dufus like Bush, whose family position and connections have enabled his success. Both she and Rubio are smart, living proof of the message that conservatives claim is how you succeed in America. If they lose this election and whine about the media not being fair, it’s their own fault. The’ve got the right people to blow through it all – they need to believe in their own message and promote them both.
These quotes from Fiorina are good. Very good. No waffling, no triangulating, but spoken from principle, if I’m any judge.
Above all, we need an intelligent, experienced, principled candidate, one who is driven by what he or she believes, not by tactics, not by what will “win”. But as important, we need a candidate with fire in the belly. We certainly didn’t have that with McCain, nor did we really with Romney. We need someone to call out the progressive agenda for what it is. We need someone to highlight their ridiculous thought processes, their lack of logic, their emphasis of emotion over reason, their belief in the primacy of collectivism.
I don’t know if any one President candidate can do it with any success, but we need one that will give it the old college try. We need one who acts like its possible to turn back the tide, who acts like he or she believes the culture war is winnable, even if it won’t be in the short run.
This isn’t a battle of politics, but a battle of civilizations, or more specifically, a battle of civilization against tyranny. While many Republicans are participating whole-heartedly with that tyranny, and many are at least complicit in it, a strong, principled Presidential candidate, the de facto leader of the Party (no noodle-wristed, pudding-spined, mushy-mouthed Steeles or Priebuses needed), could ignite the smoldering fires of the American spirit that still lives in the majority of hearts in this great nation.
This early in the process, I can still believe that might happen.
I found this woman to be surprisingly refreshing. I would love to see her in the race and would pull for her winning or have a vice seat. She definitely is everything that Hillary is not.
Early on I said I was interested in Cruz, Walker, and Fiorina. I still am.
Fiorina continues to impress. Fiorina is very bright, easily handles all the tough media questions about her time and exit from HP and everything else. She is a conservative comfortable in her skin and with her beliefs.
The GOP is very foolish allowing Fox to exclude her from the first debate.
Hugh Hewitt has the best idea about how to handle the large gaggle of candidates. Stage a three hour debate, put the candidates in stadium seating, bathroom breaks every hour, broadcast on YouTube so voters can watch their candidate or any other.
Go Cruz, Wallker, Fiorina !!!!!
Scott, Carly and Ted are my top three.
I’m sick about The Donald entered the race. He will allow the Progs to mock the large field and The Donald as the ultimate uber rich blowhard. It will tar the GOP brand. That being said, he has some good messages and would be our best Secretary of Commerce.
Mitt at State.
Lindsay to Defense.
Chris to Justice.
Bobby to HHS.
Jim Cramer to Treasury.
Ted to SCOTUS.
I like her too. She seems tough, smart and like she has ideas and principles that are solidly classic liberal. Time will tell!
While I doubt she will rise at this point to the Presidency, stranger things have happened. I could see her as a VP candidate and one not as polarizing as Palin though not as magnetic either.
Someone has got to save us from Hillary and it can’t be Bernie Sanders (shudder!)