Photo: The woman who won’t be our next president. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Posted under fair use.
Most observers, most notably Nate Silver, the prognosticator par excellence who correctly called all 50 states in the 2012 election, agree that Carly Fiorina won last night’s GOP debate. Megan Garber of The Atlantic explains,
“[She] spent much of her speaking time last night proving that she could also fit in with the boys. She adopted a commanding, no-nonsense stage presence. … These are moves … that are, of course, adopted pretty much wholesale from the Hillary Clinton handbook. But Fiorina made another Clintonian play last night, too: She took advantage of her presence as the only woman on the debate stage to frame herself, specifically, as a representative of women.”
Well, that’s pretty smart, given that women are roughly half the electorate. And when the game is to stand out from a crowd of eleven performers on the stage, it helps to be the only woman in the group, and to wear blue when everyone else is wearing black. But what about Fiorina’s odds, and what kind of candidate is she?
Silver, who thinks Rubio is so obviously the GOP’s best candidate that he wonders why they haven’t nominated him already, said Fiorina is “maybe a safe enough choice that the [party] establishment could support her, or at least not actively fight her,” but notes she has yet to draw much in the way of donors or endorsements. These need to come fairly soon, if she is to be a serious contender. It’s not clear her party will embrace her.
After two sterling debate performances, it’s now clear that Fiorina is a “skilled speaker,” as Garber puts it. By that she means Fiorina speaks forcefully, crisply, and to the point. Undoubtedly that’s part of what got her to the C-suite in business, and communication skills are useful if not essential for the occupant of the Oval Office. But being a good orator, by itself, isn’t enough to get elected president, or to be president.
The sad truth is, Fiorina isn’t remotely qualified to be president. This becomes apparent when she talks about Iran; as The Atlantic’s editorial team points out, “her ‘plan’ for Iran involved bringing the rest of the world back around to reinstituting a sanctions regime against Tehran, something that most experts reject as unrealistic.” In fact, there isn’t a chance in hell of that happening; it’s either Obama’s deal, or no deal, no sanctions, no option but military action.
Fiorina makes a game attempt to talk knowledgeably about military strength, and projecting military power, but in this sphere she’s scary. If you pay attention when she speaks, she sees things as black-and-white, but almost all of the important issues in the world are shaded and nuanced. The reality is that if you threaten someone with military force, they may decide to fight; and if you go to war, you may lose. In poker terms, she doesn’t known when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em, and that’s a recipe for big trouble down the road if we’re careless enough to entrust an unskilled novice with decisions of war and peace.
Beyond questions of national security and ultimate decisions, the job of president involves a great deal of ordinary politics, at which Fiorina has zero experience. The White House isn’t an entry-level job. The nation’s top political job requires a top politician who has established working relationships with other top politicians and has deep experience with how the political process works and how to make things happen within it. Presidential powers are mostly persuasive; a president can’t do much without bringing Congress and the public along.
Fiorina’s claim to have executive experience rests entirely on her business career. Apart from the fact her biz-cred is questionable, having been fired from her CEO job at Hewlett-Packard after running the company into the ground, this isn’t a relevant credential. Sure, it’s a favorite meme of Republicans: If only we elected someone who would run government like a business …. But we’ve had actual experience with that, and what we’ve learned is it doesn’t work, because business and government are different and business skills don’t transfer well to managing the public sector. (That’s why colleges have separate degree programs and curricula for business and public administration.) Most of our businessman-presidents have been failures in office. Our great inspirational leaders of the past didn’t come from the business community; they were very good politicians. The skills needed in the White House are highly particularized to the political environment in which presidents operate. It doesn’t help that Fiorina’s management style at HP was “imperious and distant” — the exact opposite of what a political leader must be.
I don’t believe Fiorina will be president, or the GOP nominee. She’s an interesting addition to the GOP race, but her lack of political experience will be exposed, and her strong debating skills won’t cover up her naivete about what presidential decision-making, especially decisions involving use of military force, involves. A candidate who says she won’t even talk to Putin because he’s a bad guy is someone who will box herself into a choice between surrender or pushing the nuclear button. Fiorina is a person who views the presidency as a series of stark choices, and her temperament doesn’t incline her to back down. The vision of a President Fiorina getting into a confrontation with an aggressive Putin over an issue like Ukraine joining NATO is terrifying.