…makes her first foreign-policy speech.
She is one of the most, if not the most impressive and clearest speakers in the race. As Andrew notes, she handles herself and unscripted questions very well, no umms or aahs.
11 thoughts on “Carly Fiorina”
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I’ll be honest, I’ve never given her a look as a candidate before now. So, I just had a quick look via Google on a few key issues, and I can’t see any glaring problems. I simply don’t know enough about her yet to say anything more than “Not unacceptable” yet, but that’s a lot better than I can say for some of her rivals.
I like her foreign policy points and the way she conveys them.
She sounds not terrible on immigration from what I can see (which puts her way ahead of most of her rivals). At least she’s clear about being against amnesty and against a path to citizenship.
I’m slightly more familiar wither her record as CEO of HP, a record that makes me a bit skeptical of her. The layoffs (about 17,000) are often cited by her detractors, but frankly, those are a plus in my book; HP took over Compaq, creating a total workforce of about 150,000, and in some cases, the merger made some jobs redundant. The layoffs were thus part of the efficiencies to be gained by the merger. What bothers me is whether or not the Compaq acquisition was a good idea. The market indicates not; HP stock took a major longterm hit, even more than to be expected from the tech slump of the time (and Compaq hasn’t exactly been a stellar performer in the market since the merger, having lost a lot of market share). I’ll need to do more research to have an opinion on whether she was a good CEO or not.
I wouldn’t mind seeing a lot of layoffs in the Federal government.
Seriously, I am becoming fairly impressed with her. Anything is better than more career Beltway insiders.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing a lot of layoffs in the Federal government.”
That’s one of the things that I was thinking regarding the HP layoffs; I like the idea of a president who’s good at layoffs, because if there’s anything that needs it, it’s the Federal government.
CJ, my opinion, and it is worth only a penny; the resurgence of Dell is part of the reason HP/Compaq didn’t do as well afterwards. As a consumer, I’m also not a fan of HP systems on the whole. I think their marketing division needs to be reigned in, so that their products don’t come out of the box with so much clutter. Dell did reign in that nonsense, so a builder could start with a clean server and operate it without bloatware. Of course, the CEO could reign in the marketers, and Michael did so. However, that seems a culture thing with HP, that Compaq employees didn’t have, and to me was the saddest part of the merger. Again, my cheap opinion.
What bothers me is whether or not the Compaq acquisition was a good idea. The market indicates not; HP stock took a major longterm hit, even more than to be expected from the tech slump of the time (and Compaq hasn’t exactly been a stellar performer in the market since the merger, having lost a lot of market share). I’ll need to do more research to have an opinion on whether she was a good CEO or not.
The whole episode is contaminated with dotcom fallout, but it’s worth noting that the major long term hit started the moment the merger was announced with both HP and Compaq dropping in value!
Here’s what I had to say about her earlier this year:
But I see two things, a history of making decisions that are good for Carly Fiorina even [when] they are wildly at odds with the expectations of her job, and a rockstar veneer that reminds me of Obama’s hype in 2008. Part of the reason I was able to see what Obama was about was because I had seen much the same with Carly Fiorina in 1999-2001.
Now, having said that, it’s possible that a huge portion of this problem was due to the complete incompetence of the HP board of directors who let her get away with a lot of stuff. But I don’t see the US voter doing much better in this regard.
“I like being able to fire people…”
– Mitt
I, too, would like to see massive layoffs in the federal government, along with other levels of government, and I remember when Ross Perot used to talk about getting everybody in a room and straightening things out and bringing down the deficit. Problem is, I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. The bureaucracy has shielded itself very well and there are laws and laws and regs and laws that are designed to make it impossible to cut federal employees. Also, every politician in Washington knows that the staff has them by the balls and can make them look incredibly stupid in a heartbeat.
Okay, not entirely impossible, because a congress cannot totally tie the hands of future congresses. But the courts have continuously upheld these laws and personnel policies and I think a President Perot would have found himself hogtied and hoodwinked for three years and then found himself in a losing reelection campaign, because nothing had actually changed. Same would be the case, I suspect, for Carly.
Thing is, if you want to cut government, you absolutely have to layoff scads of employees, and the only way to do that is to have the American people unblinkingly behind you, so that no self-interested politician will stand in the way. The only way to do that is to make it the centerpiece of the campaign.
“If elected, I am going to cut the federal workforce back to 1960 levels, make no mistake. It is the ONLY way to get the deficit and the debt under control and the ONLY way it is going to get done is if all of you get behind me and stay behind me. I will talk about little else in this campaign but this issue.”
If Ms. Fiorina – or anyone else – wants to run that campaign, they’ll have my vote. But they won’t.
/end depressing train of thought
There is a four letter word to describe the problem: SEIU
Didn’t JFK legalize the unionization of Federal employees by executive order? Even FDR didn’t want to go there.
Seems to me that a future President could outlaw government unions by EO.
The bureaucracy has shielded itself very well and there are laws and laws and regs and laws that are designed to make it impossible to cut federal employees.
That’s true, but laws are not holy writ handed down from on high. There’s this legislative body in DC called Congress that can write or change laws. Imagine that – if the current laws are a problem (and they are!), change them. Unfortunately, I see little evidence that anyone in Congress wants to take on the Nomenklatura. Even if we elected a president who ran on reducing the size of the bureaucracy, without action in Congress nothing will happen.
Right now, it seems the Republican Party leadership’s position is “Vote for us, we suck less!” Sorry, but that isn’t good enough any more. Give me someone I can vote for, or I won’t. It’s not enough to vote for someone because they say they aren’t a Democrat. I’ve never skipped an election but I just might if things don’t improve.
A determined fiscal sanity President’s first fight doesn’t have to be Custer’s Last Stand.
Two separate pieces: First, start marching around categorizing. Call it “Triage”. There’s the good stuff, the not-so-good stuff, and the bad stuff. “Reorganize” the good stuff and the not-quite-so-good-stuff into one department, and the bad stuff into another department. You’re explicitly doing this with the future fights to cut in mind.
You want every eventual argument to be “Yes, we’re only cutting the completely separate chunk no one knows what they even do – the ‘Clean Air’ department was made into the completely separate New-EPA -last- year.”
Republicans never do this step. Democrats always design things explicitly to attempt to prevent this. (Like Planned Parenthood – intended from the get-go to be a convenient neighborhood source of abortions.)
The -Second- piece is to spur infighting within the bureaucracy. “If you can come up with a viable approach to eliminate a non-field-agent position, you get a bonus of one year’s pay for that position.” Make the Koskinen’s keep an eye out for their own position. And, I hear we can’t -fire- anyone. Fine. New federal job for all federal employees without currently assigned positions: Stand in the National Mall.