This Sunday will feature two of McCain surrogates brought on to defend McCain and Governor Palin - former HP CEO Carleton (Carly) Fiorina and former MA governor Jane Swift. The primary qualification these two have for inserting themselves into the national spotlight is that they're women, because both of them have atrocious records of management and governance. Let's take a look at their records.
Jane "accidental governor" Swift
Somebody needs to tell John McCain that an endorsement from former GOP Massachusetts Acting Gov. Jane Swift is not a coup vs. Romney. Never-elected, ineffective first female governor of Massachusetts lurched from one petty scandal to another and became an object of ridicule, forcing her to cede the party nomination to Romney without a fight in 2002.
Swift became governor of Massachusetts when the governor at the time resigned to become ambassador to Canada. Remarkably untalented but ever ambitious it's no surprise she's become a McCain "truth squad" surrogate as she more than likely feels deep sympathy for Sarah Palin - another untalented and unintelligent individual who landed her governorship (and may yet attain the vice-presidency) through fortuitous circumstances.
Like Palin Swift "Swiftly" became involved in scandal both before and while serving out her predecessor's term in office.
While Lt. Gov she used a state helicopter for personal business, forced staff to run personal errands for her as well as babysit her children and then claimed:
"It’s not always easy and convenient for me to just pop in and out of errands like it is for everyone else."
She later claimed her ethical lapses were due to having a baby, saying:
''It was virtually impossible for me to take advice and make decisions when I was responding emotionally as a mother, not thinking rationally as a public official.''
In true Republican style she claimed that the normal rules didn't apply to her and used the apparatus of state power to her personal advantage. Apparently the voters of MA thought the same of her because after reviewing her dismal poll numbers she declined to run for the office she inherited from her predecessor and served only one year - a year clouded in scandal.
Carly Fiorina - shitcanned former CEO of HP
Carly Fiorina, the very embodiment of the dot-com boom corporate superstar. One is hard-pressed to think of anything she did during her time at either Lucent or HP that wasn't designed to burnish her own image -- at the sacrifice of anyone who got in her way. Indeed, that's exactly what she's doing now with her self-exculpatory book: blaming the victims -- that is, everyone but herself -- for her failings as a manager.
There is one more way that Fiorina is lucky. Just as she managed to skip out of Lucent right before the Feds arrived, so too has she been out of HP just long enough for the media not to draw too many connections between the scandal and the pestilential culture she created at the company. Only a few reporters have noted that the leaks began during the last days of Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard, when her policies and personality had turned the board into an armed camp, etched with paranoia and divided against itself.
Carly Fiorina is a perfect surrogate for McCain. Like him she's continually failed upwards, he by using his POW status to deflect questions on his judgment and her by using corporate America's guilt over the lack of opportunities for women in the boardroom to land herself increasingly more responsible and high-profile positions. She's a starfucker extraordinaire, more known for shmoozing with celebrities than making the all-important business decisions necessary to keep a corporation healthy and growing. She alienates those around her and then cries "sexism" and claimed there was a "conspiracy" against her when called on her irresponsible choices in corporate governance. For that she was hated by the employees of HP. Reportedly there was "dancing in aisles" when this wicked witch was unceremoniously fired by HP.
For all her attempts to rewrite history, there are certain facts that Fiorina cannot escape. The first is that in the only plebiscite on her leadership -- the proxy vote over the acquisition of Compaq Computer -- HP employees, men and women, repudiated her. Fiorina may claim now that HP's current strong business is the product of her strategy -- a dubious claim in itself -- but the fact is that the first requirement of corporate leadership is to get the employees to follow. At that, she failed miserably.
In other words, her employees, her shareholders, industry analysts and her own board of directors repudiated Carly Fiorina's leadership of Hewlett-Packard. There is a clinical term for people who believe in such elaborate conspiracies against their own person. Meanwhile, the truth is that, for all of her post facto justifications, Carly Fiorina was a failure at Hewlett-Packard.
Trust me, that reputation endures in Silicon Valley, where she now enjoys the title (not easy to get) of the worst CEO in Valley history. And for real Carly-hatred, you need only visit a local HP division and ask any survivor of her time with the company. Ask them what they thought of Carly Fiorina, and then you'll have your answer.
There you have it. A failed, accidental former governor of Massachusetts who used state employees and the machinery of state for her own personal good and then left office after a year because she couldn't win election on her own. A failed, star-fucking former CEO who was shit-canned by her corporate board after running her company into the ground (while laying off a combined 22,000 employees in the process) and still hasn't found another job (but there may be one waiting for her in a McCain admin). These are who the McCain-Palin camp send out to defend them. Remember their names because I've got a feeling this isn't the last we're gonna see of these two pathetic failures.