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.