On a cloudless spring afternoon, Carly Fiorina strode onto an outdoor stage in Pleasanton, Calif., with the happy, hungry expression of someone not just confident of an enthusiastic reception but counting on one. She surveyed a riot of signs artful and artless — “Give us liberty, not debt,” “Pelosi’s gavel is the new health care colonoscopy” — and beamed. For the stemwinder on bloated government that she was about to deliver, there was probably no better audience than these thousands of angry rebels, spread across acres of fairgrounds near San Jose for a special Tea Party rally. And there was definitely no better date than this one: April 15. Tax day.
Fiorina rattled off a slew of stratospheric numbers about the national debt, then example upon example of what she deemed federal overreach, proclaiming: “The federal government does not create the American dream, although the federal government can surely destroy the American dream.” The crowd applauded.
“You know,” she went on, her voice dropping, as if weighed down by emotion, “I have lived the American dream.” That was her segue into a condensed version of her professional biography: a liberal-arts degree from Stanford University that didn’t qualify her for anything in particular; an abandoned stab at law school; secretarial work; and then, thanks to a late-blooming focus and a lot of ferocious effort, a dizzying climb up the corporate ladder, culminating in more than five years as the chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard, by far the most prominent American company that a woman had — or, to this day, has — ever run. Fiorina, in a phrase, made history.
And now she is trying to make a political career out of that, running for the Republican nomination for the Senate seat held for nearly 18 years in California by Barbara Boxer, a liberal Democrat who has long been at the top of the Republican hit list. Not just to the Tea Party but to all the Republicans and independents who will vote in the June 8 primary, Fiorina presents herself as a businesswoman, not a bureaucrat, capable of bringing private-sector savvy to a beleaguered economy.
The crowd in Pleasanton loved her, and as she left the stage, she was buoyant. Then she took a few questions from local reporters on hand. One asked about a federal probe into whether bribes greased Hewlett-Packard’s access to the Russian market when she ran the company. In a tight, brittle voice, Fiorina said she knew nothing about that. |
