Carly vs the Demon Sheep, the Sequel, or: Second (or Third and Fourth) Republican Debate(s) Reactions
I’ve always had a soft spot for Carly!, in part for reasons that I could not acceptably articulate here. So let’s just say I was also an English major, and also once toiled at the lowest levels of California tech, though our paths greatly diverged, meaning that, unlike her, I never became CEO of a big company, starred in a car commercial, or ran for Senator against Barbara Boxer, while in recovery from chemo and surgery, and never had the opportunity to employ Fred Davis to produce possibly the third- or fourth-greatest political ad of all time, in my expert opinion:
I’ve always liked how much Carly! riles intellectuals inside and outside of academia, and especially including the legion of techies who can never resist the opportunity to spray venom far and wide in regard to her abortive and controversial reign at HP. I noticed on Twitter last night that she had the defense intellectuals also foaming and spraying.
Good for her! I don’t think she has a chance of being the R nominee, I think she’s kind of a phony in a lot of ways, and it’s hard for me to believe she really believes many of the things she says, but that goes for all of ’em everywhere, and my soft spot for her remains tender as ever. More important, well before the debate, or the second of the two debates, or fourth of the four debates, was over, she was already being declared the winner. I think the same evil media forces anointing Carly! and blowing up her balloon have a sheaf of needles at the ready, but what matters infotainmentwise now (or all that matters, really) is that everyone is bored of Trump, and we all want and need to move the narrative to a new phase, and maybe bring Burt back into the fold – though not a demon sheepfold.
Side comment: It’s interesting how the Rs spend primary season elevating figures who contradict the identity-political critique of the party as an institution of and for WHITE GUYS. I’m also still thinking that Rubio, partly for i.p. reasons and partly because his views are acceptable to the majority of Rs, and partly because he seems like a nice guy and not dull, is probably going to be on the R ticket, and has a much better chance than Carly! or what’s-his-name with the hair and the insults.
Anyway, truth is, I didn’t watch most of the debate. My mainly apolitical housemate, oddly enough, did watch it or a lot of it, and repeatedly emerged from his room to report on what he’d noted. So I finally gave in and turned on in time to see Jeb! nominate a dang furrener for the $10 bill, and I kind of liked but was unsure about Carly!’s dismissive meta-answer (keep the bills as they are – it doesn’t matter).
So much for my completely sound and correct analysis. Anyone else?
Image by John Pemble 
Fiona did very well in the debates. Bush spun his wheels and got wedgied by Donald who, himself, had an average performance except when Fiona cut him down cold and forced him to back track.
I earnestly hope that Bush hangs in there until the crazy candidates fade and then trudges on, wounded and mauled, to claim the nomination via sheer naked institutional support. In my mind that’s one of the most plausible recipes for a demotivated base and a nice healthy drubbing against Hillary come next November.
Rubio makes me uneasy and unhappy. His nomination could salvage the GOP’s Hispanic outreach strategy and his youth represents a solid barb against my party’s most likely candidate. As such I very much hope he fails to break out of the primary pack.
Donald appears to, if anything, be some kind of viral reaction by the electorate to Jeb being in the race. Like an allergic reaction or something, the allergen Bush is reintroduced and the body politic responds with fevers, sweating and a big swollen Trump repeatedly and aggressively savaging Bush. I hope that Bush has the fortitude to endure it. My motivations are pure as the driven snow of course.Report
You’re calling Trump’s response to Fiorino backtracking? Good god, was it ever NOT that. He doubled-down on the idiocy of that particular comment AND the general misogyny he has displayed throughout his campaign.
Afterward, there was an interesting conversation about whether she needs to smile now and someone (I think Van Jones?) spearheaded an argument about the sexism inherent to that, since none of the men were being told to smile more. I didn’t watch the entire debate so I can’t speak to how accurate the initial critique was or the critique of the critique was, but it seems like a conversation worth having, namely how we treat candidates of different sexes.
Overall, I think Trump looked like a buffoon, especially with all the lame high five attempts. I think he tipped his hand that this is all trolling with how unseriously he handled the whole affair and when he said of Bush, “He won’t get my vote.” He said it as if he were already resigned to being among the voters selecting someone else. It was interesting. Trump also made the vaccine-autism link and Carson refused to outright denounce that.
Speaking of Carson, Ben Carson doesn’t know what socialism is. Even less so than most people who fundamentally misunderstand it.
Bush continues to look like Will Ferrell doing a Bush impersonation. He seems genuinely annoyed that he has to respond to anything other than fainting praise. Like, “Ugh, why don’t you people just nominate me already?” And while I think it unfair he be asked to answer for his father or his brother (just as I think it unfair to ask Clinton to answer for her husband), he seemed to weather those questions fairly well.
And I’m now convinced that everyone who discussed the PP videos does not know that video editing is a thing that exists.Report
The main point, Kazzy, is she stopped him cold and then he fumbled into a fiasco. There’s no upside there for him and plenty for her. Point Carly.
In that Trump keeps precipitating self destructive nonsense in the GOP field I wish him good health and a long campaign.
Bush’s response to the challenge about his brother may play well to the further right but the vast majority of the country isn’t going to buy that. My god(ess?) kept the US safe? What does he get a mulligan after 9/11? Or for that matter that he killed more Americans* with his war in Iraq than the hijackers did? I hope he keeps parroting that one; wraps W around him like a sweater and see’s how it plays on the runway. I’d enjoy not having to worry about the 2016 outcome at all.
*To say nothing about the other people he killed.Report
I can’t speak for everyone, but I think that most Republicans do not blame Bush for 9/11 at all, and draw a solid line at “before 9/11” and “after 9/11” for basically everything surrounding security. So when Jeb says, “He kept us safe,” he’s *really* saying “He kept us safe after 9/11, which changed everything and was not his fault.”Report
…and a “furthermore who was in the WH for eight years prior and had plenty of warning including an actual major attack on the same main target and why do you think the Clintonistas really got so upset about The Path to 9/11 so you really, really want to go there?”
It’s been long enough though, I guess, that more people have forgotten why both sides, except on the fringes, kept to the gentlepersons’ agreement about not turning the rock over.Report
I don’t really hold the GOP or the Dems at particular fault for 9/11, but even setting aside 9/11 the admin Jeb! has to defend didn’t exactly cover itself in glory on the safety or foreign policy areas of things… hmm or the domestic policy side.. really the best I can say about W was he was a force for good in Africa on the fight against AIDS and he was on the side of the angels with regards to blaming Muslims for terrorism.
But the point remains, I think of Jeb! going out on stage and talking about W’s administration like that to the general electorate and my mouth waters.Report
and he was on the side of the angels with regards to blaming Muslims for terrorism.
Which makes me slightly sympathetic to the contention that the Right has never gotten the president they really wanted, one that would make Urban II look soft on Islam.Report
It’s sad how much that amuses me.Report
I don’t think the conservative movement takeover of the Republican party will end until they are able to nominate one of their own and he fails ignominiously. They haven’t gotten their guy yet (We’re looking at Bush 1, Bob Dole, Bush 2, McCain and Romney as the nominees since Reagan. The movement conservatives have held every one of these guys in contempt both before and after the elections).
And then, election after election, they tell themselves because the nominee “wasn’t conservative enough to win.” This won’t end until they are able to see how someone “conservative enough” gets the nomination. They have been quite effective at pushing the Congress (most particularly the House) to the right for the last 35 years, but they never got their guy in the driver’s seat.
So, incredibly, I’m rooting for Cruz.Report
Didn’t Goldwater prove that conservatives can get their candidate, fail spectacularly in a general election, yet continue marching to the beat of that drum undetered?Report
Well, the hard-core bunch, yeah, who aren’t going to give up no matter how badly they lose. I have some acquaintances who will go to their graves believing it’s possible to roll things back to 1890.
And that’s despite the half-century since Goldwater which the progressives have clearly won. Even the last 15 years: Medicare Part D, Obamacare, a bigger federal role in K-12 education, gay marriage, and CO2 emissions regulation (years of bickering over the details remain, but the SCOTUS has blessed it unless the CAA is amended).Report
That was kind of a different situation. That was the first gasp of the conservative movement, and it was a tremendous achievement to get their guy as the nominee. But the only reason that could happen is that Kennedy’s death made Johnson’s re-election a fait accompli, and it was the consensus of the political class of the day that it would be a wasted effort to field a real candidate.
Now, the conservative movement has not only taken over the party, starting with Reagan, but has been pushing it further and further to the right, starting with Newt Gingrich’s ascent to the House Speakership in 1994. Now it is clear that the movement is the heart and soul of the party (even if they are ideologically distant from the median Republican voter). Now, it is impossible for a Republican House member to be “conservative enough,” but the plutocrats still manage to get their guy for the presidential nomination.
Although I’m a pretty solid Democratic Party voter, I would very much like to see a conservative party that competes near the center. The post WWII consensus helped build a pretty historically remarkable period of consistent growth that was shared by all, increasing expansion of civil and human rights, and beginnings of a the consumer, women’s and environmental movements. (I’m not at all claiming that it was a lost utopia, but it beats the hell out of the current polarization and barking at the moon).Report
Goldwater was a sign of what would become of “principled conservatism” for all who cared to see: a very decent man who opposed the Civil Rights Act on libertarian grounds, but the bulk of whose support came from people who opposed it for the obvious reason.Report
Does this mean that liberals can recognize that there is such a thing as principled opposition to something like the Civil Rights Act on libertarian grounds? Wow!Report
There are principled reasons to be wrong in all sorts of ways.Report
I would say there is a solid 0.235% of the voting public who legitimately oppose the Civil Rights Act on libertarian grounds. By “legitimately”, I mean they consistently embrace libertarian ideology (not “embrace it when it matches the GOP party platform but ignore it otherwise”). Special Pleading among faux libertarians who are actually just run of the mill social- and economic- leaning conservatives is pretty common.
But I’d be surprised if any of the actual principled argument folks are registered Republicans, although they (may) consistently vote that way.Report
I’m trying to think of a “principled conservative” who said “Of curse the section of DOMA that denied federal recognition to state-recognized SSM was wrong, because marriage is a state issue.” Was there even one?Report
or gal, in the case of Hillary Clinton.
but really, a lot of what we’re seeing with the Republican party right now a party still in disarray due to the Bush legacy (and the obvious fact that no one really wants to own it. The Republican party historical trend is still dominated by the re-sorting of the parties in the 70s and 80s when the Solid South shifted from Democratic political machines to Republican ones – which is an under appreciated facet of how Gingrich came to power, the re-sort critical to how Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in Clinton’s tenure for the first time since Truman.
In a trace analysis the conservatives were the center of gravity in the Republican party ever since Nixon was picked to be Ike’s running mate (Nixon being the young con darling of that era), and never really went away. Nixon got the nom in 60, Goldwater in 64, Nixon again in 68 and 72, then Reagan in 80 and 84 – Ford in 76 due to elevation to the Presidency because of a fluke, and parties generally *don’t* kick out a sitting President off the ticket. (though it happened to Tyler). By the time Bush Sr got his turn, he was marketing himself as Reagan 2.0, conservative, but kinder and gentler. His son did the same thing. Dole was a lot more conservative than most give him credit for these days (it helped that he was in the minority party most of his tenure too).Report
Yes very much this. The entire Obama term has been about the Republicans establishment trying to figure out how to jettison the entire Bush W legacy without jettisoning the Bush W. people (because the Bush W. people are the establishment).Report
“(I’m not at all claiming that it was a lost utopia, but it beats the hell out of the current polarization and barking at the moon).”
Note, that is pretty much the fault of one party; if you are in doubt, look at what they’ve done, and look at the current Klown Kavalcade.Report
…and who warned the incoming administration, only to be brushed off because they wanted a war with China or Russia or somebody else.Report
at most Republicans do not blame Bush for 9/11 at all
Of course. It was Obama’s fault.Report
Right. How could I forget?Report
Oh, yea, Firorino EVISCERATED Trump. I should have made that clear. I just meant that calling Trump’s fucked out response “back tracking” fails to account for how he was really doubling down.Report
” What does he get a mulligan after 9/11? Or for that matter that he killed more Americans* with his war in Iraq than the hijackers did? I hope he keeps parroting that one; wraps W around him like a sweater and see’s how it plays on the runway. I’d enjoy not having to worry about the 2016 outcome at all.”
For The Base, the answers are:
1) 9/11 was Clinton’s fault.
2) Katrina was Clinton’s fault (and LA government, and God’s Will).
3) The Iraq War was purely defensive, and if Bush wasn’t stopped by DemokRat treatson, he could have done it in 1999, and prevented 9/11.Report
“He [Dubya] kept us safe, do you remember him on the rubble” is a pretty big own-goal, an easy youtube soundbite that doesn’t require a deep knowledge of some topic or some specific set of videos to go ‘WTF is he talking about?’Report
Someone at team Hillary taped that one. I suspect we’ll hear it again.Report
Yep. They’re watching (and nailing it)Report
I really cannot understand this perception that she “did well in the debates.” She seems very definition of “feral,” to me. Almost everything that comes out of her mouth is not only factually incorrect, but full of engineered vitriol and contempt.
There is no one else on that stage that fills me with more comtempt and fear than Fiorina. It doesn’t help that I know a bit about her reign at Hewlett Packard.
I’m not just snarking here (I’m snarking, but I’m not just snarking). You can look at her and think “presidential?” Please elaborate.
(Also, see this article from Vox).Report
“[Conservatives] can look at her and think “presidential?” Please elaborate.”
Soitenly! The base loves her because:
1. Almost everything that comes out of her mouth is not only factually incorrect, but full of engineered vitriol and contempt.
2. There is no one else on that stage that fills [liberals] with more contempt and fear than Fiorina.
Glad to help clear that up!Report
“I really cannot understand this perception that she “did well in the debates.” She seems very definition of “feral,” to me. Almost everything that comes out of her mouth is not only factually incorrect, but full of engineered vitriol and contempt.”
She spoke crisply and decisively. Journalists don’t judge actual facts and suchlike.Report
Carly will forever bear the animus of presiding over HP’s breakup and decline, but she isn’t all that responsible for it. Dave Packard and Bill Hewlitt had a way of doing things that wasn’t quite working any more, and something had to change. There were brilliant aspects to what they did, and how they ran things, but there were also crazy aspects to it. Such as doing layoffs strictly by seniority, with the least senior employees the first to be laid off. Better to do it by skills than by seniority, and not nail yourself into a coffin.
Carly was charged with shaking things up, and she did that. She just didn’t do it right, but I’m not sure there was a right way to do it.
I’m quite pleased to see her pushing back at Trumps “look at her face” idiocy. I’m even more pleased that this is working for Republican voters, as best I can tell. Not that I am likely to vote for her.Report
“Carly was charged with shaking things up, and she did that. She just didn’t do it right, but I’m not sure there was a right way to do it.”
I think this is a very astute comment, not just on Carly, but on the whole concept of change in business, or politics for that matter. It is one thing to know that we need to do things differently, or that things aren’t working anymore. What to do afterwords, to shift directions or slow down, whatever, is a great unknown. And it is quite easy to see in hindsight that something wouldn’t work, but at the time of implementation? So many variables and unknown unknowns.Report
If things go well, it was because you’re a genius and you deserve all the credit (as well as riches beyond avarice). If they go badly, that was just the hand you got dealt so it wasn’t your fault.
I wanna be a CEO too!Report
“[HP] stock under Fiorina was a disaster — falling 65% from July 19, 1999, to Feb. 8, 2005. It was a tough time for the stock market, too, as the Standard & Poor’s 500 dropped 15% during the same time.
…
What about the actual performance of the business? The company’s net income under Fiorina didn’t budge during her tenure and even dropped into the red in 2002. HP’s net income was flat during the period, even while reported net income of the S&P 500 rose 70%.”
Hmmm.
She did pretty well tho, earning close to $100,000,000 over that time frame.
http://americasmarkets.usatoday.com/2015/05/04/president-fiorina-how-carly-did-at-hp/Report
This one made me say “Ouch.”
Report
Boom, headshot.Report
Carly was charged with shaking things up, and she did that. She just didn’t do it right, but I’m not sure there was a right way to do it.
Jeb! could say the same thing about his brother. There was no really right way to deal with Saddam, so why not a grossly incompetent invasion and occupation?Report
The idea of doubling down in commodity hardware, when their biggest competitor saw the writing on the wall and was in the process of exiting the business. She also tries to claim that her failed PwC deal was proven correct by IBM, while ignoring the fact that IBM ended up paying less than a fifth of what HP offered*. There are lots of good ideas that become bad ideas at 5x the price.
* HP purportedly bid $18B, IBM closed it at $3.5BReport
“Carly was charged with shaking things up, and she did that. She just didn’t do it right, but I’m not sure there was a right way to do it.”
OTOH, if figuring out how to do it right isn’t the CEO’s job, then what is the CEO for?Report
From Wikipedia;s description of Carly’s tenure as president of Lucent:
On the surface, Fiorina seemed to add 22,000 jobs & revenues grew from US$19 billion to US$38 billion. However, the real cause of Lucent spurring sales under Fiorina was by lending money to their own customers. According to Fortune magazine, “In a neat bit of accounting magic, money from the loans began to appear on Lucent’s income statement as new revenue while the dicey debt got stashed on its balance sheet as an allegedly solid asset”.
Her “success” at Lucent was the main reason she was offered the CEO-ship at HP.Report
There was also the fiber bubble in the later 1990s, where 20 different companies were borrowing money from all sorts of sources, each with the claim that they would capture 20% of the long-haul data market. That Lucent was having to make loans itself would be a very bad sign — those companies must have been even worse than the crap companies that were attracting the investment bankers. When the bubble burst, on the order of $2T in market value disappeared. A good deal of that fiber will never be lit, as it either goes to the wrong places, or is incompatible with new laser technology.Report
Slate is theorizing that this could represent the start of the end of Donald’s campaign. North is probably right that Jeb! will get the nod through sheer establishment power but Kaisch is my vote for darkhorse right now.
The big problem with North’s scenario is that the hard right will double down.
In other news, Ann Coulter made a bunch of anti-Semitic tweets during the debatesReport
I’m loathe to defend Coulter at all, but Coulter has said far worse. Plus, after stripping out the specific phrase “[fishin] Jews” her overall point – that it’s perplexing* that the Right Wing in the United States has an outsized interest in the security of the State of Israel, in spite of the fact the Jewish population of the US is comparatively small, and the Jewish population of the Republican party is even smaller – is an observation that a lot of people make. And more often than not, an observation made by people not on the right wing.
*but it’s perfectly understandable as a combo of the legacy of Cold War alliances and Christian fundamentalist and/or evangelical eschatologyReport
The last time the GOP decided not to care about the Jewish vote was when James Baker famously said “fish the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway.”
In some ways I agree with you because most American Jews vote Democratic but for reasons I can’t quite figure out, the GOP decided that the Jewish American vote is one that they really want to convert. My entire adult life has been dominated by articles of “Is this the year Jews switch?” every two to four years.
As far as I can tell around 20 percent of American Jews pull for the Republicans. This 20 percent is absolutely hyperbolic about the fact that they are a minority and they think us Democratically inclined American Jews are dead wrong.Report
Honestly, it’s a bit of, “why aren’t we winning these white people?”
I mean, they can understand some wacky leftist white people going off on their own and voting for the godless liberals, but the Chosen People of Israel, who are successful, intelligent, and so on, and so forth. They’re obvious Republican’s!Report
@jesse-ewiak, I think this is white. The 1960s joke about Jewish Americans was that they “live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” Logically, Jews should have been one of the first white ethnic groups that jumped over to the Republicans party in the 1970s or 1980s. We suburbanized and had a high income level for the most part. The concentration of Jews is high enough in certain areas to give Republicans a slight edge in traditionally Democratic states.Report
@leeesq – “I think this is white.”
Heh.Report
Yes, by average income and average net wealth, one would expect a more Republican skew to the Jewish population of the US*, but Republican support for Israel has very little to do with converting the Jewish population of the US to the Republican party.
*as the ethnically Arabic population of the US skewed Republican before 9/11Report
Well let’s be real here. Jewish Americans have by and large always been a distinctly urban culture and the left and the Democrats are the urban party; and it’s not like the Dems are rabidly anti Israel or something. Jewish people don’t have to choose between their urban sensibilities and their Israeli kin; there’s a party that matches those interests very well.Report
Urban UMC and wealthy voters lean Republican a lot more than the median urban voter.Report
Well wealthy in general leans a bit towards the GOP but that’s a very small slice of the populace.Report
Why do we assume the right takes the position they do on Israel because they are courting the Jewish vote?Report
For one thing, it’s a really stupid way to court the black vote.Report
Who’s we? I just said that Republican support for Israel *isn’t* about trying to attract Jewish voters, it’s about who the Hawks have supported all their and their parents lives, and the idea among certain flavors of Christianity that Israel needs to kick ass before Jesus returns.Report
Evangelical Christian support for the Jewish state is more frequently tied to numerous passages in the Bible that are taken to promise that those nations that support “Israel” will flourish, and those that do not will not – here’s a list I dug up.. A reading of modern history intended to demonstrate the truth of the proposition will often follow. The role of Israel in the Second Coming may also be invoked, but in my observation is not a first reference point.
Also, though I think your observation about the Hawks is accurate as far as it goes, support for Israel isn’t just inherited habit for them. There’s much more to it – EDIT: as, actually, I’m confident you’re aware! – and it partly overlaps the religious concept.Report
And the rabid pro-settler, anti-Palestinian-state posture adopted by the GOP is well the the right of both the median Israeli and the median American Jew.Report
The posture may obviously be to the right of those, but as long as it avoids appearing too “rabid,” it doesn’t seem to harm the Rs at all with the American electorate.Report
But doesn’t particularly endear them to the majority ofJews.Report
I don’t know if it alienates either, though, otherwise Schumer wouldn’t have had to decide between backing the Iran deal or jeopardizing his leadership bid.Report
Nope, but they or we (relatively complicated story) – American Jews – have been buttering their/our matzoh/bread on the secular side for quite some time – though is a very complex process going on, worthy of numerous long and intermittently highly offensive posts with 1000-comment threads and lots of never-to-be-healed hurt feelings.Report
I’m loathe to defend Coulter at all, but Coulter has said far worse.
I don’t think that counts as a defense.Report
If the Hard right doubles down and Hillary is president that’s an environment that she’s been preparing for her entire life. I think she’d do well. She’d hold the line on Obama’s various accomplishments and the vetoed bills filibustered bills would pile up like snowflakes. Eventually the fever has to break on the right and the only way I see is through.Report
These debates are basically just empty calories, but I can’t help myself; they’re like Oreos, or something.
What I keep coming back to: what do Jeb Bush’s big donors think about when they watch him these days? Rubio has a (relatively) similar policy program and is just miles better than Jeb at running for president. Do they feel duped? Silly? Defiant?Report
Shut up Dan! Big bush donors could be hiding in the undergrowth around here, don’t give them ideas!!!Report
Relax. I don’t think there have been any big bush donors since the ’70s.Report
I… don’t want to know what that means…Report
We want … a shrubbery.Report
You must have different defense intellectuals on twitter, because the ones on my feed were generally pleased by her on-point name drooping and fleet shout-outs. The problem with any of her ideas is that there’s no way right now to pay for them, between contractors pricing themselves out of business and a near first time in a century appreciation that budget consciousness includes defense as well as welfare.Report
Liberal defense intellectuals who called her a liar; cranky defense intellectual John Schindler who called her a poseur (poseusse??) – sampling:
https://twitter.com/20committee/status/644334333612982272
https://twitter.com/20committee/status/644335177242705922
Plus several were echoing Boxer’s reminder that HP dealt with Iran, purportedly illegally, during Carly’s reign.Report
Giving Iran HP equipment is the most underhanded, regime-destabilizing action since deposing Mosaddegh. The CIA is going to give her a medal.Report
Yeah – Iran probably spent the bulk of its oil money on ink cartridges.Report
Anecdata: I live in Colorado Springs and am in IT. I have stories about HP that are both my own and that I’ve heard from friends who also worked there.
These are friends that could be described as “boring, run-of-the-mill Republicans”. Apolitical insofar as they have better things to do than show up for the primary, but they “get in line” come November and vote the straight Republican ticket. Vaguely hawkish, vaguely socially conservative, vaguely fiscally conservative. Listen to Rush, pro-impeachment during the 90’s, pro-Bush during the oughts, anti-Obama during the tweens.
They would vote for Hillary before they’d vote for Carly.Report
I know one like that (former HP employee, as they used to have a large campus near Houston). I’m pretty sure he’d just not vote, or vote third party. Or write in Trump.Report
I dunno about the rest of the country but the IT community here in Colorado Springs has everybody pretty much two or three degrees of separation from everybody else and, as such, freakin’ everybody knows a guy who knows a guy who has a story about working at HP under Carly.
Colorado is fairly purple what with Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, and the crazy mountainous part of the state being red balancing against Denver and Boulder’s (and sometimes Pueblo’s) being blue.
But if the IT folks in my circle are representative of anything at all, Carly can’t count on Colorado Springs.
Which would mean that she can’t win Colorado.Report
Delicious! *tents fingers*Report
The consensus in the telecom industry is that Lucent’s great financial performance on her watch was due to the late 1990s fiber bubble and a batch of very questionable accounting. She got out before the bubble burst. When it did, the company cratered.Report
My true-red, dyed in the buckskin, Rush-loving brother in law was an HP lifer till he was downsized by Carly. He’d never vote for her.Report
I have to say I continue to be amused by the republican parties unshakeable belief that running candidates who are personally responsible for firing many people in multiple states is a winning strategy.Report
Calling her a poseur with no deep knowledge of what she’s talking about is a fair cop, but it’s an odd attack from a defense intellectual. The dream of any defense intellectual is a politician that takes their briefing sheets seriously. There hasn’t been anyone aside from Ike and Bush Sr (and maybe Dick Nixon) that’s run for President in the modern (i.e. post WW2) diplo-military era that has any more than a layman’s knowledge of how the foreign policy sausage is made before sitting behind the Resolute desk.Report
What I’ve been hearing is more that she named dropped real things but proposed nonsense solutions on the substance (just like in most of the rest of her performance)Report
Yes, like putting ‘thousands more troops in Germany’*. I would have never thought that ramping up from 40K troops to (say) 45K would make Putin quake with anything other than laughter, but then again nobody’s paid me to trash two corporations.
*And conducting military exercises with Baltic nations. Which we are already doing, but I’m sure that a GOP President will conduct more vigorous exercises, or whatever.Report
So my boss and I just finished watching some clips from the debates.
As far as I saw, Trump still got all the zingers, particularly against Paul and who was it, Weber? And a bit of Jeb too. Nice.
A coworker comment that she thought Carson was dressed like a pimp. Much fun was had watching. Let’s have more soon.Report
Did you see the exchange between Trump and Firorino Damon? He limped away from that one bleeding. At least one person on the stage came packing the heat necessary to deal with Trump. Thank goodness it’s another anti-establishmentarian.Report
No I didn’t. My boss was viewing that while talking to me before I realized he wasn’t really working…then we started watching the clips.Report
There is absolutely nothing anti-establishmentarian about Fiorina. The only thing that made it so that she’s not a dedicated part of the GOP establishment was not winning a senate seat. So, she’s not part of the establishment. But she’s trying to be, and would become a leading part of it if she somehow were able to win the nomination.Report
@michael-drew
Of course. Most every politician is, or will become part of the establishment. That’s why I laugh so hard at those who voted for Obama claiming he was an outsider and would bring “change”. Sure…..
Hell, even Trump is part of the establishment. His appeal is that he doesn’t seem to care what other people think of him and doesn’t appear to run a poll to test the voters on every topic before he opens his mouth.Report
Yeah she doesn’t talk anti-establishment does she, you’ve got a point there.Report
@michael-drew Never mind that she want’s so desperately to be in the political “establishment” but just can’t seem to get elected.
This may be her moment. I would put good money on her being the VP on the Republican side. A more competent Sarah Palin to get people interested in the inevitable Bush ticket.Report
They could do worse I suppose.Report
Not only could: probably will. The last GOP VP candidate who was both competent and non-loony was Jack Kemp.Report
Cheney was both competent and non-loony. You could argue that he was evil, but being competent and non-loony is how he made the VP office more than the usual pitcher of warm (spit).Report
I actually mused on Cheney but he’s gone so far off the deep end since exiting the office I thought it was a battle not worth having.Report
Not a terrible bet, and there have been murmurings to that effect, but odds at this point don’t favor any choice in particular for VP, so don’t put good money on it! Part of it may depend on how exactly her flame is extinguished, but no one can say now what the race will look like in July in Cleveland.
The Palin comparison is instructive, but what Fiorina represents – and the reason that she was a McCain adviser/spokesperson rather than his running mate – is something different. If Palin had been more what cons thought they saw at the 2008 Convention, and less what we have seen ever since, then she would have fit the theoretical model of a reform Republican with natural connections to constituencies where McCain perceived weaknesses – working class, women, younger voters, also his own Christian conservative base. Carly! overlaps Sarah!, but is a much different kind of figure, not just a more articulate version of the same “outreach.”Report
Depending on how she goes out on the presidential nod she could be an effective choice to try and moderate a Hillary! campaigns innate advantage with women voters.
Geographically, of course, she’s a total waste. The GOP is never going to get California.Report
Dunno, Hillary not doing to well with the ladies right now. “The steep decline among women, which is sharpest among whites, is the main force driving the poll’s overall numbers, which show support for Hillary Clinton falling from 63 percent in July to 42 percent now among Democratic-leaning voters.”Report
With two bucks and September polling you can get a cup of coffee and five minutes of a bored political affairs journalists time.
We’ll see where Hillary stands if she gets the nod and once there’s an actual body in the GOP candidate slot.Report
The other day I said something about the conservative base turning conventional pinhead logic in it’s head (or more accurately, rejecting it completely), and I think we’re seeing something analogous in the Hillary campaign. That is, her campaign strategy seems to be to a) present a bunch of policy proposals which she thinks will be supported by the liberal base (platform) and b) present an image of being entrenched within the elite political establishment (electability!). And she thinks – like really believes, apparently, given that she’s running this campaign pretty much exactly like the last one – that those two things are (or ought to be) sufficient to win an election. What her campaign planners (including herself, I suppose) fail to realize is that a large part of the liberal base is not in love with establishment-oriented national politics, either, and she doesn’t present herself as offering a change that gets people closer to their preferred policy goals (while presumably Sanders, at this moment in time, does). In other words, she appears to intentionally try to take personality outa the electoral equation. As a friend of mine who is a diehard liberal and Dem voter said the other day: “she’s not a people person”.
In her defense, I think she views that as an attribute, since what she wants to focus on is policy and the nuts and bolts of governance. But voters wanna see something more than cold, clear rationality. (That’s certainly true on the conservative side!)
I think she’ll win the nomination (of course!), but I also think feeling the Bern may incline her to get betta’ at expressing more personality along the way, something I think she’ll probably need to win in the general.
That’s not even worth two cents, but there ya go.Report
Might be interesting to see if she makes overtures to Sanders about the VP slot, perhaps offering him some interesting areas of authority.
I know the VP is traditionally just a vestigial appendage but it seems to me that turning over some policy areas to the VP (obviously the final call is the President’s) for development and implementation is a plus.
Modern presidents have to delegate like crazy anyways — too many balls in the air. Might as well start with the VP.Report
Given that Clinton, if elected, would be the second oldest president, and that Sanders is even older, I would think they would be looking at a more youthful VP. But, if Bernie keeps the young voters excited, the combined age of the ticket may not matter.Report
I don’t think age is a major problem, he doesn’t have a convenient geography though. Really it depends on how the primary goes.Report
She was destined to find a crisis somewhere along the line, of just the current configuration: Poor, unlovable Hillary, undergoing the familiar Clinton agony and putting her people through it, too. This is about how she’s rolled ever since she married Bill. It’s easy to think of a list of Hillary crises and near-crises of this general type right off the top of my head, and even leaving out the ones that were mostly all about Bill or are complicatedly symbolic (Tammy Wynette and the like) or inside campaign baseball: Health Careghazi, Commodity-Futuresghazi, Rose Law firmghazi (also connected to Fosterghazi), Benghazighazi, Clinton Foundationghazi, Emailghazi. Will be a long time and potentially more ghazis to go before we know whether it keeps her from walking into the presidency.Report
CK,
Agreed. Another half a cent….
The thing about all those GhaziGates is that they originate politically from the perception that Hillary is always working the back room in devious ways, which is in part (or maybe wholly!) created by a perception of opacity in her doings and carryings-on. Her personality is, like, literally!, opaque to those of us outside her inner circle. And the reason all these GGates stick to her in a way that they don’t stick to other politicians is because her responses to them lack exactly the same type of personal transparency which created them in the first place. All this takes place at a purely political level, seems to me, and irrespective of whether or not there’s any substance to the accusations leveled at her.
She’s just really bad at the politics side of politics, seems to me.Report
Well yeah…darn Hillary for that fostergate…she was really bad at politics there. Oh yeah with Bengazi she really was bad at the politics by ummmm…well yeah she was bad at all those R driven investigations that found squat. Well yeah the Clinton Foundation, which was illegal, well it wasn’t but yeah. And how dare she work on healthcare ( says paid actors on ads from insurance companies).
Of course some complaints are real so that means she is at fault for bs ones.Report
There are a lot of ways to talk about this stuff, greg, but one way is to focus on Hillary’s behavior. I only became aware of the GOP’s Hatred of Hillary when she, as a matter of fact!, non-transparently worked the backrooms as First Lady to try to overhaul the US healthcare delivery system. The GOP was, rightly, in my mind, POd about that.
Fast forward to EmailGate, and you’re seeing the dynamic play out pretty much exactly as I wrote about it upthread (course, I’m the one who wrote it so of course I think it’s exactly right!).
Now, you and zic and others can focus on whether or not she violated any laws or whatever, but that misses the point I’m getting at. (As I said the last time we talked about this!) I’m talking purely about the politics of it, and how she handles those types of purely political challenges.Report
I would agree that it would be best for her to have gone to Be Squeaky Clean mode years ago because there were real concerns about the Clintons legal dealings years ago. However that wouldn’t change anything from how the R’s go after her and media perception. CK name checked vince frickin foster!!! And Bengahzi has been yet another conservo political hit job.
I’m fine with dinging her for things she has actually done, just not for nutball R attacks and clinging to the designated narrative. Like i think she was wrong about having a private email server even though nothing illegal has been found. I also think Bush and his crew were wrong to use RNC email accounts when they were in and Powell and others were wrong to use private email servers. All wrong but Hills isn’t worse then they are yet the “scandal” drags on in large part because the R’s are screaming about it and the media has a set narrative about her.Report
Well Greg the media really doesn’t want her to have a coronation (they wanna get paid) and they especially don’t want her to have a coronation because I suspect the media fears that whatever GOP candidate staggers bleeding out of the clown car is not going to be a very big challenge to her in the slog of the general (they wanna get paid).Report
“CK name checked vince frickin foster!!! ”
Remember how important it was that Mitt Romney shaved someone’s head back in college?Report
Why yes, months of conspiracy nutballs suggesting the Clintons had a guy murdered is the same as, what, some talk about a a college bully. Those are entirely the same and not a ridiculously poor comparison.Report
That’s a fair and really strong criticism – about my “namechecking Vince frickin Foster” – given the COMPLETE ABSENCE of conspiracy nutballs attributing the foulest conceivable treasons and other crimes to Republican leaders, and of relatively mainstream left-liberal observers passing them on or reinforcing them in more acceptable language.
If one or another close associate of Reagan, either Bush, or Cheney deemed likely to possess intimate knowledge of secret matters and dealings had (apparently) committed suicide during some ongoing investigation of one or another scandal or possible one, then he or she would be “name-checked” from here to eternity, and it would be fair to mention the fact (parenthetically, without attribution validity to any accusations) in any discussion of public reputations.
There’s a pattern with the relationship of both Clintons to the public. Mark Shields – a left-liberal pundit of the (first?) Clinton Era – liked to say that while other candidates had “baggage,” Bill Clinton had an entire baggage train. And HRC has been one of the drivers of that train for 40 years. It’s just who and what they are to “us” – not just highly contradictory figures in themselves, but representatives or symbols of our maddeningly self-contradictory political culture.
For the left-liberal coalition, as a whole, the above has meant willingly setting aside facts and allegations about the Clintons that, if they were as credibly attached to a leading Republican, would be treated as obvious deal-breakers for any sane and decent citizen. I make this observation as someone who is open to voting for HRC and in fact voted for her the one time in my life I could. I think it should be obvious even for those inclined to like the Clintons, if not for those who are too young to recall and have never heard of nor read about Whitewater or about the missing Rose Law Firm billing records and their (to my knowledge) never explained mysterious appearance in a White House private quarters book room, and so on, and so on…
and so on
and so on
(to the tune of Slow Train Coming)
https://vimeo.com/63508956Report
You are bothered by Whitewater…fine and dandy. There were plenty of things to be bothered about re: Bill. Whether Hillary is also responsible for some of that is a different question. But you bring up Vince Foster then you are into conspiracy nutball territory. The entire thing was investigated but that didn’t stop some R’s from fear mongering and throwing out unsubstantiated theories.
I’ve never said there aren’t reasons to be skeptical of Hillary or that Bill/Hill didn’t give people good reason to view them negatively. What i’m saying is that so much nutaball BS gets mixed in. This leads to correct push back and dilutes the actual criticism. Complain about Whitewater = fine. Just happen to mention allegations of murder ( without attributing validity) is sleazy. If you aren’t trying to chum the water with oh so “unattributed allegations” then why even mention them?Report
You’re the only one who said anything about “murder.” I noted, parenthetically, using the suffix “-ghazi” in what I think was an obviously diminishing mode, that the Foster matter (which raised natural questions about a relatively high-ranking official and intimate of the First Family committing suicide, thus the high level investigations you reference) was connected to the Rose Law matter. Those interested can look up names mostly forgotten by now, like “Maggie Williams.” It was a weird and suspicious episode that no one on the left would ever forgive and forget regarding figures on the right, no matter how hard you tried to shame them with things brought up in further-leftier far-out precincts.Report
I think that’s a pretty good analysis.Report
A Black man in a pin striped suit = pimp?Report
Yeah, it raised an eyebrow with me as well. She didn’t actually say “pimp” but was hinting around at it and I said something like “you mean, like, what do they call those guys, a pimp?” and she was all in agreement. Then she said something to the effect that “I was waiting for him to put on some big colored hat”.
Truly I laughed out loud at the imagery and her comments.Report
I voted for Fiorina in ’10, IIRC, and she seems like one of the less terrible choices the Rs could make. Given the historical alignment between my preferences and those of Republican primary voters, this is a sure sign of doom.Report
La-la-la-la-la I-will-not-engage-a-presidential-debate-more-than-a-year-before-the-election la-la-la-la-la!Report
What the fish are you doing in here councilor? Do we need to lock you in the broom closet?Report
CK: “I’ve always liked how much Carly! riles intellectuals inside and outside of academia,.. ”
So p*ssing off intellectuals is a attribute of a GOP leader which you care about?
“…and especially including the legion of techies who can never resist the opportunity to spray venom far and wide in regard to her abortive and controversial reign at HP.”
Where ‘controversial’ means ‘f*cked up two tech companies (three, counting Compaq).
” I noticed on Twitter last night that she had the defense intellectuals also foaming and spraying.”
Ordinarily, this is good, but she did it by being bone-headedly stupid.Report
You have some other attribute I should care about at this point? You seem to have missed the parts where I described this phase of the process as infotainment, discounted Fiorina’s real chances, and, now that I think about it, may have stepped over the line in attacking her integrity.
From the left I enjoy the spectacle of self-serious critics of corporate America and the business class turning into expert business analysts, as though they would be honestly impressed by a CEO with a different resume. If Fiorina’s performance had been judged an unqualified success, or even merely average, we’d instead be getting all the stuff from the anti-Mitt playbook: Business success does not translate into political effectiveness; she’s is a member of the elite paid inordinate sums while the workers live on gruel; she doesn’t care about regular people; profitable deals x, y, and z destroyed the lives of this, that, and the other nice, normal workers or whole communities, or destroyed this, that, or the other sympathetic competitor; she was unfeeling and unkind toward this rival or that staff member; she or her husband or her husband’s cousin’s wife who appeared at their wedding employed a Mexican gardener and Salvadoran nanny; she outsourced x-thousand, -million, or -zillion jobs that could have been filled by Americans and so on and so on. Eventually, recordings would emerge…
I think it’s probably true that business acumen doesn’t translate well into politics or political leadership. If that’s true, then business failure, or failure at the highest levels, also doesn’t necessarily mean very much.
Seems to me that she rose in the tech world for the same reason she is judged to have done well in the first two debates: She gives excellent presentations, and, all things being equal, it’s good PR to put her in a position traditionally reserved for men. In exchange for the (not unusually) ludicrously huge amounts she was paid, she now has to deal with having flaws in business models and corporate cultures, some of the same ones that probably helped explain her having been selected in the first place, attached to her. Probably good training for presidential-level politics, though our modern presidents (and other political and military leaders) defer their big paydays until after they’ve left the jobs.Report
as though they would be honestly impressed by a CEO with a different resume
One that wasn’t first fraud and then failure would be a help.Report
Because I spent all 5 hours with these debates the other night, I had to literally take a day to recover before commenting. All I can muster is that the whole bit was terrible. I can see no viable scenario that finds me voting for any of these people.Report
Would you describe yourself as a frequent GOP voter?Report
@north Nope, although I have some conservative tendencies.Report
Well hell, who doesn’t?Report
@north I can name a few co-workers. Anything less than the SWP or RCP is a betrayal in their eyes.Report
You should point out that said attitude is very conservative-now and watch their heads explode.Report
@north I have been down this road. Anyone who still follows Bob Avakian at this point is just a circus freak that I enjoy looking at.Report
If there are those demon sheep, trying to win elections, she is right that it should be our number one priority to stop them. They are the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen.Report
Jindal sounded more extreme than anyone I’ve ever heard in a presidential debate. Ever. That was noteworthy to me. The rest was pretty much what you’d expect. Trump seemed a little more like an ordinary politician, which may or may not help him. Who knows.Report
I want to add that Trump’s comments about the Iraq War, and putting it in Jeb’s face, was satisfying. Sure, Rand has been against the thing for a long time and has said just that, but having an asshole like Trump really force Bush to address his brother’s folly was enjoyable. The fact that Bush’s “my brother made us safer” comment garnered such an applause was telling as well.Report
There’s a LOT of denial about Iraq still.
Because really, who wants to admit the ball was dropped so massively, and that we kicked over a country that had nothing to do with it — and created a chaotic mess we could only contain for a short time?
The mess in Iraq, the rise of ISIS — that was baked into stone the second we waltzed into Iraq without a flipping plan for the aftermath, except for some vague platitudes about free markets and democracy.Report
I wonder if the folks that felt threatened felt rather foolish when it came to light that a black person put the signs up?
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/nyregion/white-only-signs-in-art-project-at-suny-buffalo-draw-concern.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0&referrer=Report
So after lecturing countries to take in refugees, the pope takes in four and they are Christians. Thats the way to lead by example!
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/18/vatican-parish-takes-in-syrian-refugee-familyReport