Carly Fiorina is the real Donald Trump. No, she’s not a billionaire with bad hair, a loose tongue and an unbridled ego the size of Australia. But she’s a non-politician who’s never held office, but is unnerved by the decline of American power and wishes to see it reversed.
But unlike Trump she may also be able to do something about it, as she a.) knows how to speak English; b.) is able to think and speak in a rational sequence; c.) has spent years learning how the world works and building relationships with the people who run it; and d.) projects actual strength instead of mere schoolyard bluster, and knows how to bring bullies to heel. She proved this with Trump in the second debate, when, as Rich Lowry said, she excised his gonads with surgical elegance, leaving him in a heap on the floor.
Unlike Trump, who knows nothing, and Carson, who knows his own discipline but not many others, she is that rare bird, an outsider with an insider’s experience of how political entities work. When the car breaks down, it’s fun for a while to stand there and kick it, but eventually you have to call a mechanic to get the thing moving. When Trump fades, which is starting to happen, his saner supporters might look to the lady, a girl of the world who knows how to project force not in a pantsuit, but in a slim sleeveless shift with a nice floral pattern. Which brings us to point number two.
Fiorina is also the genuine Hillary Clinton, if you have in mind not merely a pro-choice extremist, but an example of how an actual woman who does not have special advantages (such as being the wife of a really good politician) can manage to rise in the world. On the basis of what we have seen now of Hillary’s prowess in action — her healthcare plan in 1993-94, her primary campaign in 2008 when she lost as the favorite and her current campaign in 2015 against a 74-year-old socialist who isn’t really a Democrat — her political talents are nil.
If Fiorina lost her first run in politics, for the Senate in 2010 against Barbara Boxer, in a blue state, and coming off cancer surgery, she has upped her game greatly, while Hillary’s win in the Senate in deep blue New York (run from the White House, and as the first lady) was widely seen as a sympathy prize for having endured Bill’s impeachment, and since then it’s all been downhill.
Fiorina was fired from Hewitt-Packard in 2005, but Hillary lost both houses of Congress in 1994 when her husband put his mistaken faith in her competence, was the country’s top diplomat during the collapse of its Middle East policy, presided over the Benghazi fiasco and urged the invasion of Libya. Hillary’s failures seem rather more critical. Hillary has held many offices, but not done much with or in them and, though much of the public thinks she’s credentialed, no one, when questioned by pollsters, can think of an actual thing that she’s done.
The fact is that if Hillary hadn’t way back married Bill Clinton, she’d be an anonymous,well-recompensed lawyer or bureaucrat who would not have come close to be running for president, while Fiorina, whomever she married, would be the same person. In the real world, this ought to make her a feminist’s candidate. And if it doesn’t, it should.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
