April 4^th

Carly Fiorina, at the most recent meeting of CPAC, pummeled Hilary Clinton to a fare-thee-well. The reception she received for this effort has helped encourage her to claim that “There is a 90 percent chance I’ll be a candidate for the Presidency.” Let us all hope so! The more wing-nuts who run for the Presidency, the more right wing money gets spent on losing causes. It does seem that if a dog barks at Hillary Clinton some right winger will want it to run for the Presidency!

Mrs. Fiorina is well known in Republican circles; she is also very well known to people at Hewlett-Packard (HP) and to folks who tried to get Senator John McCain elected President in 2008.

 We’ll look at her HP career first: Mrs. Fiorina was the CEO of HP when HP acquired Compaq Computer. This merger was completed against the advice of Walter Hewlett, the son of one of HPs founders. But Carly Fiorina and her minions overrode these objections and bought another low margin computer business; that, and other mistakes, caused a substantial drop in HP’s stock…about 50 percent. That was a no-no.

Then came cost cutting, anything to recoup profits; that didn’t work either in spite of terminating 18 thousand employees. The result of all this was that after more than five-and-a-half years as HP’s CEO Carly was canned.  You have a problem when you act against the express advice of the son of one of the company’s founders…and you are dead wrong about what you did. But let us not mourn for poor Carly because she is by no means poor Carly; her severance package after screwing up this company and sacking 18 thousand employees was to receive a separation payment valued at 40 million dollars. Who says failure doesn’t pay off.

In 2008 Carly Fiorina becomes the feminine face among John McCain’s advisors in his quest for the Presidency. In an interview she claimed that while Sara Palin was being unfairly harassed by the media she still didn’t have the skills to run a company like HP, indeed neither did John McCain. (She neglected to mention that she didn’t either!) The result of this absence of judgment was that she was moved away from direct public contact by the McCain campaign.

Her next effort was to contest the senate seat of Barbara Boxer in California.  This did not work any better because she tried to demonize Ms. Boxer who turned Carly’s efforts right back at her. And now Carly Fiorina is considering a run for the presidency. We can only hope that she decides to go ahead with that choice.