She will probably not be the presidential nominee of her party (though she may be his running mate), but Carly Fiorina’s bombshell performance at the Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday has made her one of her party’s most valuable players — and one of the reasons her party may win.
Whatever she was in her rookie run in 2010 against Barbara Boxer, she has upped her game to a new level. And she is solving the problem of how to run against Hillary Clinton, who is planning to run as the symbol of womanhood, immunizing herself against critiques of all kinds by calling them wholesale attacks on her gender in general, and thus on all women alive.
How to defuse it? Have the toughest critiques come, coolly and civilly, from a woman, who is in all ways her equal. Meanwhile, let the men take their shots at the party she stands for, and talk up the fresh start, the bright new beginnings. If their names turn out to be Walker or Rubio, let them play up their humble or (better still) immigrant backgrounds, their frugal and modest personal styles, and their comparative youth.
A man might be able to critique Hillary in strictly factual terms of specific performance on singular instances — on Benghazi, or Libya — but only a woman could have charged, as Fiorina has done, that Clinton’s entire career has lacked any major accomplishment. Only a self-made woman who made her own breaks can point out that Clinton was given her breaks by her president husband, but then, as with healthcare, failed to put them to any good use for the country. Her greatest successes have come after she retired in 2012 from government service and persuaded a whole lot of people who ought to know better to pay her $300,000 for speeches.
Fiorina is not just a woman, but exactly the right kind of woman to talk to the upscale middle class and professional people who might be in Hillary’s base. “Saturday Night Live” could not do too much with her. She doesn’t skin anything, she is not from Wasilla, she has no pregnant children, and she has never castrated a hog in her life. A coastal elite with the very best schooling, at ease in the same social, financial, and intellectual worlds that Hillary lives in, she could undermine Hillary among her own people in a way other women could not.
Since she emerged in 1992-93 as a “new kind of first lady,” Hillary has presented herself as the voice of all women, dismissing critiques of her views as attacks on “strong women,” or even all women. That was then, but now things are different. Hundreds of women now hold state, local, and national office, from the dogerbluest of dogerblue states and districts to the deepest crimson, and all shades in between. Hillary Clinton now does speak for women — just as Kelly Ayotte and Elizabeth Warren speak for women, which is the way that Bernard Sanders, Ted Cruz, (and Obama and Boehner) can be said to all speak for all men.
Most people now see this — all except Hillary, who said a few weeks ago, “There is a special spot in hell for women who don’t help other women.” Despite the fact that last year she failed to help Reps. Mia Love, R-Utah, or Martha McSally, R-Ariz., or Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa when they ran and won against men.
To Hillary, the one woman who matters is Hillary Clinton. Carly Fiorina is the right woman, in the right place and moment, to try to take Hillary down.
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.”
