“Elizabeth Warren is right,” Carly Fiorina said on Fox News in March, “crony capitalism is alive and well. Big business and big government go hand in hand.”
The woman gets it.
Fiorina, the former Hewlett Packard executive and failed Senate candidate from California, entered the presidential race on Monday. For months before her official campaign announcement, Fiorina trained her fire on an insider political class that enriches itself from big government to the detriment of everyone else.
However her race turns out, it will benefit the GOP to have her voice, particularly if the shamelessly corporatist and cronyist Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee.
On the policy front, Fiorina opposes the worst corporate welfare programs. Unlike Chris Christie, Fiorina has said she would abolish the Export-Import Bank. Unlike Scott Walker and Jeb Bush, Fiorina went to Iowa and seemed to knock the ethanol mandate: “It’s not the government’s job to determine market access,” she said.
Given her low odds of winning the nomination, Fiorina’s policy positions may be less important than her rhetoric.
Fiorina’s attacks on Obama’s interventionist economics aren’t the typical GOP cries about socialism, or blunt bashing of “big government.” She drills down to the crucial point: Bigger government enriches the insiders at the expense of everyone else. As she puts it, “[T]here is a political class that is totally disconnected from [ordinary people’s] lives and that’s stacking the deck against them.”
She said last week that the “dirty little secret” of “Obamacare or Dodd-Frank or all of these other huge complicated pieces of regulation or legislation, is that they don’t get written on their own. … They get written in part by lobbyists for big companies who want to understand that the rules are going to work for them.”
At the National Review Institute’s summit Saturday, Fiorina busted out the Warren line again: “Crony capitalism is alive and well. Elizabeth Warren, of course, is wrong about what to do about it. She claims that the way to solve crony capitalism is more complexity, more regulations, more legislation, worse tax codes. And of course the more complicated government gets — and it’s really complicated now — the less the small and the powerless can deal with it.”
Another key line: “Government gets bigger and more complicated, so only big companies can thrive. … Family businesses and startups are getting crushed.”
Even on social issues, Fiorina is distancing herself from big business, and aligning herself with conservative positions. As big companies lined up against Indiana and Louisiana’s religious liberty laws — and implicitly in favor of forcing small businessmen and women to violate their consciences — Fiorina criticized the businesses for caving to social pressure.
Politico chastised her for deviating from the big business line on religious liberty (as well as on immigration) in an article headlined, “Is Fiorina Out of Touch With Corporate America?” I believe Politico’s editors meant that as a negative possibility. As conservatives strive for a populist mantle, it’s a dream headline.
Given the crowded field, and her political newness, the odds are against Fiorina being the GOP nominee. But her role in the race will be crucial, whether it’s simply as a candidate in the primaries or as an eventual running mate on the GOP ticket.
She has shown she can articulate the case for free enterprise that can best appeal to the middle, especially working-class voters in swing states like Ohio. Government regulation and spending tilts the playing field towards the well-connected political class, crushing opportunity for entrepreneurs and rewarding the cronies. This is both an economic argument and a fairness argument, and it’s only tenable if it’s fueled by attacks on corporate welfare and crony capitalism.
Hillary Clinton makes this attack more relevant. Hillary and her husband became multimillionaires by giving highly paid speeches to foreign governments and big corporations. Their Clinton Foundation seems to have raised money in part by using Hillary’s and Bill’s political connections to steer public policy to benefit donors.
As a senator, Hillary was flatly transactional when it came to public policy and donations. Bill Clinton, by all appearances, sold pardons and access to the Lincoln Bedroom.
The Clintons embody the big government crony economy. A successful race against Hillary will have to masterfully exploit that weakness. Part-time corporatists who defend the sugar program or the ethanol mandate will be handicapped in making that attack. Boring old conservatives who pretend they’re running against Ralph Nader will miss the mark, too.
Carly Fiorina may never rise to the top of the GOP field. Even so, her free-market populist message could win the day.
(Note: Hours after this column was published, Rick Perry came out against Ex-Im. An edit was made to account for his change of heart.)
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.
