Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Carly Fiorina for vice president?

Washington Wire:

The former Hewlett Packard CEO, an economics adviser and fund-raiser for Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, has never run for public office before. But in an interview Tuesday, former McCain campaign official and current Republican National Committee Deputy Chairman Frank Donatelli refused to rule her out. “I am so impressed with her,” Donatelli said. “We could do a lot worse than Carly.”

There’s been a low-level buzz among conservatives in Washington about Fiorina’s prospects for a couple of weeks, apparently spurred by a private lunch Donatelli attended with antitax advocate Grover Norquist. At the lunch, Donatelli talked up Fiorina’s conservative positions against abortion and gun control, say people with knowledge of the meeting.

HP’s board fired Fiorina in 2005 for poor performance. On the day her firing was announced, HP stock jumped 6.9%! Even so, HP stock was still worth less when she left office than it was when she assumed office. She was consistently unable to out-compete Dell, something her successors have managed to do on a regular basis.

Like George Bush, she is famously immune to criticism and famously stubborn, which is hardly an attractive pair of qualities these days. Indeed, in some respects she very much resembles Bush, as these anecdotes suggest:

She once donned cowboy boots, stuffed her pants with her husband’s socks, and announced to a testosterone-y sales team from Ascend Communications, “Our balls are as big as anyone’s in this room.”

I’m ready for a President who doesn’t have any need to prove anything about the size of his or her testicles--whether real or metaphorical.

Anyway, check out this interview in which Fiorina discusses her support for McCain. In the course of which she says at least one thing I agree with:

When the economy is going bad, food prices are increasing, gas prices are increasing, do you want your taxes to increase as well? I don’t think so. When American businesses are struggling to compete around the world, do you want to continue to pay the second-highest tax rate in the world? I don’t think so. When you’re struggling to figure out how to pay for health care and send your kids to college at the same time, do you really want your government making those choices for you? I don’t think so. When times are tough, do you want more money in your own pocket and more power to make your own choices or do you want less money in your own pocket and less money to make your own choices? I think it’s a pretty clear choice.