Ranting On...Carly Fiorina and the White House

Earlier this week I had the displeasure of seeing the odious Fred MacMurray picture Kisses for My President, a film that dealt with an issue we're still wondering about fifty years later-when will the United States finally have a female president and who will it be?  Women from Margaret Chase Smith to Geraldine Ferraro to Hillary Clinton to Sarah Palin have gotten closer and closer to being the answer to that second question, but to no avail.  Recently, however, Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, has been making waves about an entrance into the Republican primaries for the White House in 2016, and I figured now would be the perfect time to weigh in on her candidacy and her chances.

I can actually answer the second point right now: Ms. Fiorina has about as good of a chance of being president as I do, and I'm legally too young to be president and not going to run.  The reality is that while she certainly has the money to buy her way into some early debates and get on the ballot, she in many ways is 2016's answer to Herman Cain.  She's wealthy, but her past campaigns indicate that she's largely tone deaf to general election concerns.  Her run against Sen. Barbara Boxer in 2010 was less noted for her ability to win votes (she got clobbered in a year where the Republicans were beating basically everyone nationwide), and more by her bizarre campaign ads (remember the Demon Sheep?) and her personal attacks on her opponent's appearance (who can forget her open mic gaffe in regard to Sen. Boxer's hair).

The other major problem with Carly Fiorina, though, is that she's being treated with similar press as if she were a major candidate and not just a failed Senate challenger with a mountain of money, and I think that may reek a bit of sexism on the part of the media.  The reality is that if Fiorina were a white man, we wouldn't be hearing about her.  She'd be, at the very least, in the same laughable level as Donald Trump (though her fame isn't anywhere near that level, so we'd hear about it even less).  She wouldn't be put forward as an alternative to Hillary or a way to fix the Republicans' lack of female contenders in a race with 20 or so serious male contenders.

Fiorina isn't the solution here-it's either getting more women into positions of power (which, admittedly, the GOP started to do something about this past cycle with major victories in Iowa and West Virginia) or trying to convince the women who are in launching pads to political power to actually run.  The reality is that the GOP, despite having an overall deficit in the number of women that they have in office compared to the Democrats, may have just as many strong female candidates for the White House as the Democrats do.  The GOP has four sitting female governors (the Democrats, it's worth noting, only have one): Jan Brewer (AZ), Nikki Haley (SC), Mary Fallin (OK), and Susana Martinez (NM), as well as Sen. Kelly Ayotte (NH), that have the exact right profile of someone who wants to run for president.  Any of these four women would receive (and deserve) the sort of press that Fiorina is receiving.  More importantly, these four women would be viewed by the likes of Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Rand Paul as someone to pay attention toward, serious threats for the office they're pursuing.  You can bet that some or all of these women are being listed as potential vice presidential candidates, and in the case of Martinez in particular, I would imagine that she's at the top of most lists.  If one of these women entered the Republican race (and quite frankly, I think one of them should as there's clearly an opening for a quality female candidate in this race-Fiorina got that right at least) they would be extremely formidable.

But the media cannot continue to treat gadfly candidates as serious to the race just because of their demographics.  The same thing goes for Ben Carson, a FOX News contributor that gets included in polls and is frequently speculated about for a presidential run, even though he's never held major political office or is not in a national position of authority (like, say, a general or Supreme Court judge) to actually be considered a serious option for the White House.  Carson's only major calling card for the GOP is that he's African-American in a race that doesn't have a serious African-American candidate for the White House.  The media should be commended for trying to diversify the presidential race, this is true, but they shouldn't be doing so by short-changing the credentials of the candidates in a way that they would if Fiorina or Carson were straight white men.  There are qualified and diverse candidates in the GOP-either push one of them to get into the race or bemoan the lack of diversity in the field.  Don't try to make third or fourth tier candidates look better just to make the GOP primaries look more diverse than they are.