Former HP boss and peddler of expensive printer ink Carly Fiorina is apparently going to have a crack at being the next republican president of the US and is standing on a ticket that she is the only woman candidate and the only CEO.
Fiorina has been talking privately with potential donors, recruiting campaign staffers, courting grass-roots activists in early caucus and primary states and planning trips to Iowa and New Hampshire starting next week.
She would be considered an outsider. She has sought but never held public office and her last campaign was in such a disarray it could hurt her current one. After all how can you stand saying you are an effective manager when you owe nearly $500,000 to consultants and staffers from your failed 2010 Senate bid in California?
Republicans have spoken about Fiorina with disdain, saying she has an elevated assessment of her political talents and questioning her qualifications to be commander in chief.
However analysts say that she might make a better candidate than the suited men that the GOP traditionally chooses.
She is also a free-market advocate who would act as an antidote to the “left wing” views of Elizabeth Warren.
The GOP also has a problem attracting women voters with some of its prominent members favouring stances on issues like rape, abortion and glass ceilings which are so backward they were out of date when the book of Leviticus was written. The party claimed to supporting women during the mid-terms only to award all the committee chair roles to white men after the election.
Helping Fiorina chart her political future are consultants Frank Sadler, who once worked for Koch Industries, and Stephen DeMaura, a strategist who heads Americans for Job Security, a pro-business advocacy group in Virginia.
When Fiorina was CEO at HP she was famously described as more important than the King of Spain, by an aide.
