For most the past year, Democrats have regarded the field of Republican presidential candidates as falling into two categories: a band of right-wing crazies that could be easily dismissed, and Jeb Bush, a reasonable-sounding moderate who could nonetheless be easily demonized as another version of his hated brother George. The rise of Donald Trump didn’t alter their view of the 2016 race as one that was theirs to lose, provided that Hillary Clinton didn’t implode over lies about her emails and Clinton Foundation conflicts of interest. But today’s front page story in the New York Times about Carly Fiorina being the Republican Party’s fool-proof antidote to the Democrats’ false “war on women” meme was the official signal that liberals are good and worried about the former Hewlett-Packard CEO. With Hillary’s “inevitable” march to the presidency evaporating before their eyes and with an aging gaffe-prone Joe Biden or an aging socialist from Vermont being only alternatives to Hillary, that presents Democrats with the possibility of an election in which the gender gap is turned on its head. So it is little surprise that in the days since Fiorina’s smashing performance in the CNN debate this week, the left has begun to push back hard against her candidacy. That means Fiorina is about to start getting the same treatment that was dished out to Mitt Romney four years and which Democrats had been preparing against Jeb Bush. The question now is whether Fiorina can survive the onslaught.
The first salvo fired in Fiorina’s direction was an attempt to turn one of her best moments in Wednesday’s debates against her. Fiorina’s impassioned plea for Congress to stand its ground on defunding Planned Parenthood drew rave reviews from conservatives when she said, “I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” Liberal writers furiously replied that no such video exists and left-wing fact checkers, such as those at the Washington Post, pronounced Fiorina’s claims to be false. But, as Mollie Hemmingway wrote at The Federalist, the entirety of the 10 videos released by the Center for Medical Progress, do vindicate Fiorina’s claim. More to the point, the seventh of the videos contains testimony from a former staffer that describes the incident Fiorina described with images of an aborted child.
While the left may claim they have Fiorina here, they’re actually making a big mistake. If the Planned Parenthood videos haven’t transformed the debate about abortion, it is because the mainstream media has resolutely refused to cover the story, let alone show them. Most Americans still haven’t seen them. The last thing Democrats need is for people to start watching these horrifying videos in which Planned Parenthood’s disgusting practices are aired. Further discussion of this issue won’t hurt Fiorina, but it will damage Democrats who would like to bury this story.
But if her stand on abortion won’t hurt Fiorina, the same isn’t true about her business record. While Chris Christie was right when he said that most people didn’t really care about a debate over whether Fiorina or Donald Trump was the better CEO, her tenure at Hewlett Packard provides an even more tempting target for Democrats than Mitt Romney’s record as a venture capitalist. Anyone who doubts that need only recall Fiorina’s sole previous venture into electoral politics in which she was trounced in a bid to unseat California Senator Barbara Boxer.
As Chris Cillizza points out today in the Washington Post, Fiorina’s defeat can be traced to the airing of an ad that highlighted the layoff of 30,000 workers she ordered at a time when her salary went up and she bought a “million-dollar yacht” and corporate jets. Losing a race in solid blue California against an entrenched incumbent is no disgrace, and Fiorina has refined her response to these charges in the last five years. But even if the story is distorted — overall, her company wound up employing more people on her watch — there are still a lot of people ready to talk about how Fiorina ruthlessly fired them while remaining personally untouched by the crisis that gutted the tech industry.
Fiorina’s biography as someone who rose from being a secretary to a CEO doesn’t fit the stereotype of the heartless plutocrat as easily as Romney. But she is still a wealthy businesswoman who can be pilloried by the Democrats’ charges about Republicans promoting inequality. After Romney’s destruction in 2012 along these lines, a lot of smart Republicans looked to candidates like Marco Rubio and the now sinking Scott Walker in no small measure because their blue-collar backgrounds are insurance against the GOP nominee in 2016 being beaten with the same stick.
That will provide a lot of fodder for liberal attack ads in the coming year if Fiorina continues to rise in the polls. But if she were to pull off an upset and become the GOP nominee, it would, as the Times fears, deprive Democrats of the “war on women” theme that has been the centerpiece of their efforts during the last two national election cycles. Even worse for them, Fiorina could actually turn the tables on the left and make the effort to elect the first female president a Republican battle cry in 2016 rather than a Democratic one.
Though Fiorina has proved herself to be the best debater on the stage in two consecutive events, we have a long way to go until then. She still lacks experience in elective office and has yet to prove that she can survive the kind of scrutiny that a potential first-tier presidential candidate must endure. But if she does, Fiorina’s rise is a potential dagger in the heart for Democrats plan to make 2016 the year of the Democratic woman. They know if they don’t demolish her soon, she could prove their undoing.
