Carly Fiorina: The Anti-Woman Woman Ted Cruz Doesn’t Need
They campaign alike, too. Ted Cruz “totally didn’t coordinate” with his super PAC by recording hours of forced family video and leaving them on YouTube where they could be “found” and turned into commercials. Carly Fiorina “totally didn’t coordinate” with her super PAC — which hilariously skirted the naming rules by being an acronym that spelled out CARLY — despite having almost zero official campaign and publicly booking appearances where that gosh darn super PAC could always track her down!
Both of them have a fun sense of biography. Ted Cruz comes from the Ivy League and once clerked for William Rehnquist and cynically portrays himself as a down-home duck-huntin’ yahoo who doesn’t know that Jemmy Madison would kick his ass up and down Independence Hall for treating the First Amendment as a blueprint for a Christian theocracy.
Fiorina cratered two companies and blames every economic woe on bureaucracy, despite the latter being impotent enough that it didn’t stop HP from using a third party to circumvent U.S. sanctions against Iran during her tenure. She also wants to fight for American jobs, despite shipping 30,000 of them to China, equivalent to half the population of Palo Alto, where her company was headquartered.
Both are great at following a script when it comes to a really good lie. Just as Ted Cruz reliably lets you know that we are one liberal Supreme Court justice away from sandblasting all the crosses and Stars of David off the headstones at Arlington National Cemetery, Fiorina hit her marks over and over again during the debates.
Remember the impassioned testimony at seeing a video of an abortion that didn’t exist? Then there was the litany of absurd national security moves on day one. After “calling [her] good friend Bibi Netanyahu,” she would start pushing more paper military commands around the map than Hitler in the bunker during the last ten days.
But there’s one script Fiorina followed that Cruz is especially interested in. The core substance of Fiorina’s campaign was this: I, Carly Fiorina, female person, will attack bad-woman Hillary Clinton for you. It makes sense, up until you notice all the ways it doesn’t.
First, no amount of Carly Fiorina attacking Clinton in a woman’s voice now erases nearly a quarter century of the relentlessly sexist commentary the GOP has directed at Clinton. Nor can her presence magically silence every chauvinist twit who thinks the one thing conservative hopes are counting on is his zinger.