Carly Fiorina is a true outsider on the political landscape, and has spent much of her life in demanding, high-level corporate management positions.
Without exception, she has been a miserable failure in every one of them. If Sarah Palin had gone into management instead of sportscasting, the two Republican stars would be indistinguishable from each other.
It's often difficult to judge how good an elected official is; there are so many measures of success and failure. Business, on the other hand, is not nearly as vague; you are either a winner or a loser.
Let's look at Carly's history.
In 1980, AT&T was one of the most respected companies on the planet. It had just spun off the "baby bells" but retained it's crown jewels: Bell Labs - a private research facility without peer, and a hardware division which was the unquestioned market leader. If you made a phone call pretty much anywhere on earth, that call was carried on AT&T hardware.
Enter Carly Fiorina, newly hired hotshot on her way up the corporate ladder. By many accounts she was ambitious, and had none of the old-fashioned mindset of stability, honesty, or consistency.
AT&T had been a place where management served the company by providing guidance. Getting a job at AT&T was a huge accomplishment. Employees were well-compensated, built large peer networks, and used that experience to make every year a little more profitable than the last.
Carly Fiorina worked her way to the top of that hardware and systems group, and must have very quickly realized that there was a lot of fast money to be made in just buying and selling parts of the company. It didn't matter if they made good products, retained customers, or even made good business sense. It's not like those employees getting pink-slipped were important.
By the time she left AT&T in 1998, the once-revered "Ma Bell" became the company better known for horrible business and investment decisions, and the most trusted name in America spent every day bait-and-switching customers into eyeball-popping long-distance services. Goodbye Ma Bell, Hello Death Star.
In 1999, Carly stepped into a management position at another American icon of technology and innovation: Hewlett-Packard.
For those of you without any grey hair, here's a quick guide to the technology world Way Back Then: (warning, major old-school geek rant ahead!)
HP was the company you couldn't even get an interview with unless you had a degree from Stanford, CalTech, UC-Berkely, or as a last resort, MIT.
DEC, or Digital Equipment Corp, was a company in MA, where you similarly couldn't get in the door without that sheepskin from MIT, RPI, Princeton, or - with papal intervention - one of those hippie west coast schools.
Compaq was the classic Texan company: A degree from Wharton would be nice, but if you can make 40% revenue growth three years straight at another company, you might get at least a shot at an interview. Know the difference between a rule and an assumption, opportunity exists where you can spot an assumption your competitor mistakes for a rule.
If you ran a financial business and needed your workers to have the latest, most powerful desktop hardware, with rock-solid support, you called Compaq. (They actually got lambasted by the trade press for "irresponsibly" introducing desktop lines with high-end processors before "waiting to see what IBM did first")
If you needed the absolute finest hardware, with everything from a $50 calculator to a $500,000 minicomputer built to the same obsessive quality standards, you went to HP.
If you were building a 911 call center, and lives would be lost if the computer hiccupped, you called DEC.
It took Carly Fiorina only a couple short years to destroy reputations and markets 100 years in the making.
In 2002, HP made the bottom-shelf PC's that you bought at Best Buy if you didn't know better. Then you spent 14 hours trying to uninstall all the crapware, which Carly included in lieu of quality or durability. Free AOL trial for all, and enter our sweepstakes for an HP-branded iPod!
By 2004, Fiorina was the go-to personality for making money fast. She was out for blood.
Addressing a trade group on the critical need for more immigration in the US, and more offshoring of jobs, she said:
'There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore'
Well, AZ may not want immigrants, but it sure looks like CA is going to.
Fiorina became quite rich as did a few of her acolytes, but the number was very small due to her unparalleled paranoia - which led to a criminal investigation and arrest warrants for several of her staff. We all remember when "pretexting" was news, don't we?
HP was hemhorraging customers, credibility, and market share. All the blood provided sustenance for competitors, however.
IBM, which had been on the ropes for several years, suddenly became respectable again. Sun Microsystems was months away from begging for a takeover. The retreat of Compaq, HP, and DEC gave these two had-beens overnight market dominance in the trading floor, in the data center, and in city halls.
More on that point in a minute.
To Carly Fiorina, success is measured only within 20 feet of her person; if she is in a G-IV, it doesn't matter that you're unemployed. A true student of Ayn Rand, Carly considers compassion, faith, trust, and community to be flaws in her competitors to be exploited.
If you are not valuable to her personal success, you are irrelevant.
I think it's quite possible that Fiorina will be elected. This will lead, predictably, to a quick shuffling and exporting of weath, jobs, and credibility from that very HP-ish state, California.
Those Fiorina-enabled booms for IBM, Data General, Sun? You Betcha. This is good news for John McCain and to it's other neighbors. And while he's got a tough race, it's hard to count McCain out.
If I were John McCain, I'd start talking today, not tomorrow, about the jobs, capital, and stability that are going to be ripe for the picking the minute Fiorina takes office.