Spot at debate’s main stage may be more risk than reward for Fiorina

By Albert Hunt

Thursday, Sept. 3, 2015 | 2 a.m.

There is a strong desire in Republican circles for Carly Fiorina to be on the main stage in the next presidential debate.

Few in the party say the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive has any chance of winning the nomination or even think she is the best candidate. Instead, they argue that a party that has a problem with female voters can ill afford a sizable top-tier field that’s exclusively middle-aged or older men. Moreover, they love her slashing attacks on Hillary Clinton, whom Fiorina frequently calls a liar.

Fiorina obviously would relish greater visibility, and her supporters expect that unlike the first presidential debate, on Aug. 6, when she was on the undercard, she’ll be part of the main event Sept. 16. CNN, the debate sponsor, this week changed the rules to make it more likely Fiorina will make the main-stage cut.

If so, there will be a new level of scrutiny she may not find entirely welcome.

There are two basic rationales for the Fiorina candidacy: She’s not a politician, and she was a successful business executive who knows how to run the economy and has dealt with world leaders.

Trouble is, she was a politician. She ran for the Senate in 2010 and lost by more than 1 million votes to the incumbent, Barbara Boxer. True, California is a Democratic state, but that was a banner year for Republicans, and Boxer never has been as popular a vote-getter as the state’s other Democratic senator, Dianne Feinstein.

During that campaign, Fiorina was seen as smart but politically naive. She displayed a tendency, one that remains evident in her presidential quest, to go into attack mode, which created sympathy, even some Republicans acknowledge, for the hard-edged Boxer.

But her central liability in that campaign was the qualification she held up as her chief asset: her experience as a high-level business executive. Starting as a receptionist, she climbed the corporate ranks. In 1999, she was named CEO of Hewlett-Packard, the global technology company. She was No. 1 in Fortune magazine’s first list of the most powerful women in business.

Not long after arriving at HP, she engineered the deal of the year, a huge acquisition of Compaq, the personal computer company.

That soon went south. Profits disappointed, the stock plummeted, she alienated the families of Hewlett-Packard’s fabled founders, along with many employees, and she lost the confidence of the board of directors. In 2005, she was fired.

She walked away with a package worth $42 million, which could be hard to explain to voters struggling with jobs and stagnant wages.

Fiorina still insists she was a victim of a “boardroom brawl” and dismisses criticism of her record. She says the company doubled in size and added jobs on her watch.

That’s true, but only as a result of the Compaq acquisition, which many analysts consider a catastrophe. The company now is splitting into two divisions. Fiorina usually dismisses criticism of her claims of success as partisan or politically motivated.

She also boasts of her international experience, claiming she has dealt with more heads of state than any candidate other than former Secretary of State Clinton, and that she understands President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Yet many of her international meetings were with business groups; she had one rather short one-on-one session with Putin in 2001.

The 60-year-old candidate has an appealing story beyond her rise in business. She’s a breast cancer survivor, is admirably transparent about the death of her stepdaughter from drug abuse, and has committed herself to fighting this scourge.

And if she gets on the big stage, she might be the one to go toe to toe with Donald Trump, who often disparages women, including Fiorina. Nonetheless, her two chief calling cards, as a successful business executive and a non-politician, may create more problems than opportunities.

Albert Hunt is a Bloomberg View columnist.