Dang it Carly, you blew a grand opportunity. An no, I’m not referring to a middle-of-the-pack performance at the last Republican debate. After a short and impressive few minutes in the spotlight, Carly Fiorina’s campaign seems to be fading quickly. It seems like it was just a month ago that I was praising her for scoring her first Washington Post hit piece, and now that momentum seems to have completely stalled.I know, Carly is hardly a perfect candidate – she faces some legitimate criticism, as commentor Nanny G. at Flopping Aces pointed out in my previous post:
I was in CA when Carly ran for office there.
Her main pollster was found dead on the floor of his own home surrounded by work he’d been doing for her.
She failed to ever pay his estate (widow and children) his last earned paycheck of $30,000.
If that’s how she treats her most helpful employees, how will she treat us peons?
Fair point, and one for which Carly absolutely needs to be able to explain. Of course, some of the criticism leveled at her isn’t quite as legitimate. Fred Costello at the Fairfax Free Citizen reports:
Donald Trump and the Post have been painting Carly Fiorina as a disaster at Hewlett-Packard (HP). Here are the HP stock prices in comparison with other companies in the computer-hardware industry.
HP was recovering when Fiorina left. The recovery would persist for a while until the effects of the new management were felt. So she did well for HP.
The facts don’t seem to be consistent with the narrative, and must be ignored at all costs!
And Carly is not without her strengths, as Ben Brody from Bloomberg reports:
She’s “an outsider with insider knowledge,” said King, who said he often texts with Fiorina and is thinking of endorsing her. “I think she has a real potential to unite the party and also be a strong national candidate.”
But most importantly, she “Speaks conservative as a first language”, and that is a huge part of the battle. Politico’s Nick Gass reported on how Carly is ready to come out swinging against the Radical Left’s notion that women have to unthinkingly follow the Democratic party:
“Actually, note to Democrat Party: We’re half the nation. And so our views differ, just like men’s views differ,” Fiorina said. “And yes, I think I am distinctly horrifying to liberals that I am a conservative woman who right now, head-to-head, beats Hillary Clinton soundly.”
Speaking conservative as a first language? American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson wrote on Carly’s criticism of Planned Parenthood’s practices:
Of course they’re trying to change the subject. Of course they’re trying to say this is life saving research. I find it amazing that this group of pro-abortion lobbyists continue to say that they are protecting women’s health. Really? late-term abortion is bad for women’s health. They continue to lobby against parental notification. Really? It’s protecting a teenager’s health that she can go to a tanning salon or a tattoo with her mother’s permission but get an abortion without her mother’s permission? This is not about someone else’s health. This is about a woman’s health. A woman’s opportunity to have all of the choices in front of her and it’s about a life that she is bearing.”
Damned straight. As I mentioned previously, abortion isn’t a big issue for me, but the dishonesty that the Radical Left uses to discuss it is. Which brings me to the blown opportunity from a few weeks ago. The Orlando Sentinel’s Hal Boedecker summed up:
Republican candidate Carly Fiorina was widely seen as the victor last week at CNN’s GOP presidential debate. But Chris Wallace of “Fox News Sunday” challenged one of Fiorina’s most acclaimed moments: Her passionate and graphic comments about Planned Parenthood and fetal research. She said the issue was about “the character of our nation.”
Wallace asked: “Do you acknowledge what every fact checker has found — that as horrific as that scene is — it was only described on a video by someone who claimed to have seen it? There is no actual footage of the incident you just mentioned?”
Fiorina’s response: “No, I don’t accept that at all. I’ve seen the footage, and I find it amazing, actually, that all these supposed fact checkers in the mainstream media claim this doesn’t exist.”
She added that she hadn’t found many people in the mainstream media who had watched the video. “Anyone who wants to challenge me first is going to have to prove to me that they watched it,” Fiorina said.
On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said she had seen excerpts from the Planned Parenthood videos.“What I am troubled by are the misleading, inaccurate allegations about them that we heard from Republicans at their debate,” Clinton told CBS’ John Dickerson. “This is really an attack on Planned Parenthood, which provides a lot of health services, from cancer screenings to contraceptive services to so many other of the needs women have.”
Clinton added that the tapes were misleadingly edited and taken out of context, repeating what Planned Parenthood has said. She said to shut down the government over funding for Planned Parenthood would be “the height of irresponsibility.”
And there is the missed opportunity. Carly should have called on Hillary to join her and set the record straight. The two could meet on CNN with one of their DNC hacks to host and sat together and watched the entire, unedited video. Even better, let’s watch some video footage of the organs being harvested. Don’t like it, too grotesque? Too damned bad. If we want to allow late term abortions as a society then so be it, but the Radical Left shouldn’t be allowed to sanitize what’s being done in their typical dishonest language.
Carly missed an opportunity to keep the spotlight and take the offensive to one piece of the radical Left’s most hallowed sanctuaries. Personally, I’m hoping that she’s choosing to lay relatively low at the moment to avoid Scott Walker’s fate of peaking too soon. But if this is the beginning of the end for Carly, we can trace it to this point where she missed a golden opportunity.
Follow Brother Bob on Twitter and Facebook
FCross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog
