“Yes, I am running for president,” Carly Fiorina told Good Morning America on Monday, bringing the GOP presidential candidates one step closer to being able to field a baseball team.
The announcement wasn’t a surprise — the failed California Senate candidate has been making trips to New Hampshire and Iowa and tweeted last night that she was going on Good Morning America to “discuss some big news,” political gobbledygook that when translated into English means, “I am announcing that I will announce the presidential candidacy that I have been hinting at announcing for months.”
The former Hewlett-Packard CEO and breast cancer survivor is the first woman to announce plans to compete in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, but not the first person considered a long shot to enter the race. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson accidentally entered the race on Sunday, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is scheduled to announce tomorrow. In a Quinnipiac University poll from late April, one percent of Republican voters said they would vote for Fiorina, while 3 percent chose Carson. Huckabee came in behind Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and “Don’t Know.”
Fiorina told Good Morning America that she is “the best person for the job.” Her success in Silicon Valley is sure to be something she brings up a bit on the trail. “It is only in the United States of America that a young woman can start as a secretary,” she recently posted on Facebook, “and become CEO of the largest technology company in the world.” She has also used her tech background to attack Hillary Clinton’s experience. “Like Hillary Clinton, I too have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles around the globe,” she said at the Iowa Freedom Summit in January. ”But unlike her, I have actually accomplished something. Mrs. Clinton, flying is an activity, not an accomplishment.”
Fiorina’s success with that argument may be limited; she has landed on several “worst CEOs in America” lists in the past few years. She also failed to learn the invaluable Silicon Valley lesson of always buying up every domain name you can before running for president. Someone else owns CarlyFiorina.org, and is using the address to post a sad face for every person laid off at Hewlett-Packard during her tenure. It involves lots of scrolling; there are 30,000 frowns total.
She has embraced her role as the only woman in the GOP presidential field, and the only woman running besides Hillary — and one with very different views on issues like abortion. “Our party needs to be as diverse as the nation we represent,” she said in January. “A woman’s voice matters in this conversation. Every issue is a woman’s issue. We’re half the nation. We’re 53 percent of voters. I bring a different perspective.” During the 2014 election cycle, Fiorina started the Unlocking Potential Project, designed to help women candidates run competitive campaigns.
Fiorina is probably best remembered nationally for the now-infamous ad she ran during her 2010 Senate race. Slate admired its “weird genius,” an NPR writer noted that he had “never done LSD — at least I don’t think so — but I suspect its effect on me would not be much different than how I felt after I watched” Fiorina’s ad. A headline proclaimed that the “‘Demon sheep’ ad may be bad move, experts say.”
Hopefully, she commissions a sequel for the Iowa caucuses.
