It’s more troubling if Fiorina buys her own lies

By Charles Blow

Saturday, Sept. 26, 2015 | 2 a.m.

The media has a new darling in the Republican presidential disaster pageant: Carly Fiorina.

She dominated, “dropped the mic,” “owned the stage” and of course did it all while “standing in a pair of 3 1/2-inch heels for three hours.”

This amount of drooling should come with a year’s supply of bibs.

It is true that she found a way to effectively engage and combat the Republican front-runner, something her male counterparts had struggled to do. Good for her.

But before the fawning frenzy spins out of control, let’s take a breath and an honest look at who is being cheered.

Part of Fiorina’s appeal, at least among Republicans, involves the thirst for an outsider. A Washington Post/ABC News poll taken this month found 58 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of conservative Republicans want the next president to be “someone from outside the existing political establishment.”

Like the other candidates at the top of the Republican field, Fiorina seems to fit that bill. Only Fiorina isn’t a political outsider by choice, but by defeat.

In 2008, she was a top economic adviser for John McCain and held the official title of “chairwoman of the Republican National Committee’s ‘Victory ‘08’ committee,” according to The New York Times. Of course, McCain lost.

And before McCain picked for his running mate that disaster of a person who was governor of Alaska, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote of Fiorina’s ambitions, “Fiorina, for her part, couldn’t be any more plain about her vice presidential ambitions without taking out an ad.”

In 2010 she ran to unseat California Sen. Barbara Boxer. Of course, she lost. But not before her campaign spent more than $22 million on the race, including more than $5.5 million of Fiorina’s own money.

By the way, Fiorina scored points Wednesday by responding to the front-runner’s mocking of her face. But her indignation carried a hint of hypocrisy because when she ran against Boxer, Fiorina was caught on an open mic mocking Boxer’s hair. These are just different versions of the same person, folks: self-aggrandizing schoolyard bullies with deep pockets.

But more importantly during last week’s debate, Fiorina unleashed a scurrilous attack in her pitch to defund Planned Parenthood, saying of the attack videos released about the group:

“I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’”

In fact, the footage of the fetus was “stock footage” that “was added to the video to dramatize its content,” according to PolitiFact, which rated Fiorina’s comments as “mostly false.” FactCheck.org also said, “We are aware of no video showing such a scene.”

As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall put it: “Fiorina has a habit of simply making things up.”

But in a way, the veracity of the attack is only one of the problems here. The other is that Fiorina would deny reproductive health services to women who have vastly fewer resources, or options, than she does.

Adele Stan captured Fiorina perfectly in a blistering assessment in The American Prospect.

“The evil genius of Fiorina,” Stan wrote, “is her uncanny ability to play the gender warrior within the GOP while promoting the party’s misogyny.” Stan continued, “But her feminism seems to begin and end with the fortunes of Fiorina herself, and seeing as she probably doesn’t rely on Planned Parenthood for her health care, she’s happy to deprive millions of women of that care by promoting outright lies about the organization, as in her false description of the video she referenced.”

This distancing herself from the realities of less fortunate women is not new for Fiorina. When she became CEO of Hewlett-Packard in 1999, she made the preposterous claim that “there is not a glass ceiling. ... My gender is interesting but really not the subject of the story here.”

How many American women pressed up against that glass would agree with her?

In 2005, Fiorina was unceremoniously ousted from that job. Since then, Fiorina has been trying to rewrite the narrative of that firing, pitting herself as the victim of an old boys’ club with a hint of cruelty that couldn’t understand and appreciate her. She frames the firing as more about culture than performance.

But after Fiorina’s memoir, “Tough Choices,” was released in 2006, my colleague Joe Nocera wrote a column titled “Carly Fiorina’s Revisionist Chronicles” that detailed Hewlett-Packard’s lackluster performance during her tenure and stated emphatically:

“So I come here this Saturday morning to offer a simple corrective. Carly, it was about performance. And if you didn’t realize that then — and can’t admit it now — you should never have been Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive in the first place.”

We also have to ask ourselves now if Fiorina is the kind of person who should be president.

Charles Blow is a columnist for The New York Times.