An American Lion

This is what the Republican Party is recruiting these days?

When Carly Fiorina sat down to speak with me recently, I was briefly taken aback. The former CEO of Hewlett Packard and current candidate for U.S. Senate from California was sporting a close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hairdo. Having completed six months of treatment for breast cancer, the 55-year-old Ms. Fiorina has dispensed with the auburn wig she’d been wearing as her hair grows back.

She says her health is now fine, and that “after chemotherapy Barbara Boxer isn’t that scary anymore,” referring to the three-term Democratic incumbent she wants to unseat in 2010. She laughs when I suggest her new ‘do may get her a hearing in precincts like Berkeley and San Francisco. On a more serious note, she says that “in these hard times, a lot of people across the spectrum will listen to my message—that California can only recover if we encourage economic growth and restrain spending and job-killing regulation.”

With a 12.5% unemployment rate, the Golden State is certainly in trouble. In 2007 alone, 260,000 Californians moved to states with more opportunity. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation says only New York and New Jersey have worse business tax climates. And a new Los Angeles Times poll found that more than half of California residents think the state’s major problems won’t fade as the economy recovers.

Ms. Fiorina is not shy in pointing out what’s to blame. “The high tax, big government, regulatory regime we see in California is the current course and speed for where the nation is headed,” she warns. “California is a great test case, a factual demonstration that those programs don’t work.” She notes that while state spending has significantly outstripped inflation in recent years, every year government services perform more poorly and it becomes harder to open a business. “I very much doubt Hewlett Packard could be founded today as a manufacturing company in California,” she adds soberly.

Really, is pity all that’s left? We’re supposed to feel pity for the woman and send her to the United States Senate? In the real world, pity gets you a book deal. It doesn’t put you into Congress, unless you’re a Democrat, of course. Thankfully, the Republican Party doesn’t do pity.

Fiorina’s disastrous tenure at Hewlett Packard, her ridiculous performance in the John McCain campaign, and her own lack of a credible effort at showing up at the ballot box to actually participate in the act of democracy mean one thing—she’s going to lose big to Barbara Boxer, and drain valuable funds away from other more credible candidates. It would take a miracle for Fiorina to win 45% of the vote, much less even win. Ergo, Fiorina is insane. No one, and I mean, no one with her track record as a CEO would ever run for anything unless they were spending their afternoons staring into a cracked mirror, having a third person conversation in dripping whispers about how all of the bad people will be ridden down by charging horses and pet pigs in golf carts.