NEW YORK CITY — During her college years, Carly Fiorina — the
former Hewlett-Packard CEO currently serving as John McCain’s
Victory Chairwoman — found life-affirming inspiration from what
many may consider an unlikely source: Albert Camus’ The
Stranger.
“The power and importance of choice, the act of becoming rather
than the stasis of being — these were to me profound ideas with
personal meaning,” Fiorina writes in her moving, candid (not
ghostwritten!) memoir Tough Choices. “If we cannot choose our
circumstances, we can always choose our response to them. If we
cannot choose who we are, we can always choose to become something
more. To stop choosing is to start dying.”
It’s a beautiful takeaway sentiment, and certainly the woman who
divined it out of that relentlessly gloomy text is a welcome
addition to the campaign of a candidate who would fine The
Stranger’s Meursault for running an ad sixty days before an
election, never mind the rest of that business with The Arab.
Happily, Fiorina, who sat with TAS for an interview last
week at a Manhattan Hilton, lives up to her considerable hype —
much as The Stranger reportedly
did for George W. Bush.
To begin with, she is phosphorescently brilliant. When once
asked by a reporter who her favorite business author was, Fiorina
answered, “Hegel. You know: Thesis, antithesis, synthesis…” At
Stanford she studied Greek to read Plato and Aristotle minus the
translation filter, and dove into Latin, French and German as well.
In person, Fiorina has a remarkable poise and an easy command of
facts that she is somehow able to relate in an easy, gracious
spirit.
Second, Fiorina is a great and persuasive advocate for the free
market and self-determination. Clearly, as my colleague Phil Klein
notes, this
has ruffled some opposition feathers. When, however, Fiorina
declares something like, “we know that the disciplines of
competition and choice work,” her own life story stands as
testimony: This is a woman who as a newly minted manager at
AT&T was introduced by her boss to clients as “our token
bimbo,” and eventually got even by rising to the rank of
Senior Vice-President. Later, Fiorina served as (albeit
controversial) CEO of Hewlett-Packard, a company she had done
secretarial temp work for as a young adult.
It’s the all-American story. Bootstraps, pulled up? Check.
Can-do attitude? Check. Perhaps with luck Fiorina will tip McCain’s
current team of rivals into a more uniformly
economically conservative direction.
SINCE LEAVING THE BUSINESS world, Fiorina has advised the
Departments of Defense and State, USAID, as well as the CIA — and
she’s learned a thing or two via this proximity to the leviathan.
“I’ve gotten a closer look at how Washington works,” she confirmed.
“Washington has many well-intentioned and able people, but all
bureaucracies take on a life of their own. All bureaucracies become
internally focused. All bureaucracies, if left alone, become
inefficient and ineffective. There is plenty of opportunity in
Washington to offer greater performance incentives and
streamline…
“In a business there are some very clear and accepted guideposts
for progress,” she added a few minutes later. “Income statements.
Balance sheets. Customer satisfaction. In government it’s a little
less clear, although sometimes the metrics of success could be a
lot more clear, it’s just people don’t necessarily want them to
be.”
Although she has been courted in the past, this is Fiorina’s
first political endorsement. She praises the Arizona senator as “a
unique and authentic leader” who won’t get so “caught up in
winning” that he loses his ethical moorings. And what does
Fortune magazine’s former “Most Powerful Woman in
Business” make of McCain’s oft-quoted statements concerning his
“need to be educated” on economics, which he has further said is
“not something I’ve understood as well as I should”?
“I was impressed with his economic chops [in 2000], and remain
so,” Fiorina answered. “Look, who wouldn’t benefit from more
education on the economy? Let’s look at the credit crunch. It is
not anything people anticipated. You clearly had very sophisticated
bankers who misjudged the situation. To me, that statement speaks
more to [McCain’s] humility than it does to his expertise.”
EVEN WITH MCCAIN’S WELL-DOCUMENTED heresy on the Bush tax cuts,
readers of Tough Choices are probably not surprised to
learn Fiorina has chosen McCain over Hillary Clinton or,
especially, Barack Obama. In one telling passage from her memoir,
for example, someone asks Fiorina why she prefers Beethoven to
Mozart.
“It was a good question,” she writes. “Mozart’s music was
angelic and otherworldly in its beauty. I could imagine divine
inspiration, but I couldn’t hear human struggle. I could hear angst
and fear in Beethoven. His music was sublime, and ultimately
triumphant in its suffering and humanity.”
As goes Fiorina’s record collection, so, one could posit, go her
thoughts on the presidential race. The times the nation faces, she
argued, are too consequential for a candidate to not be
rooted in some practicality and reality. “John McCain will never be
an eloquent orator the way Barack Obama is,” she said. “Barack
Obama is an extremely appealing candidate to many, many people and
we shouldn’t underestimate that. I think the way we run against
him, though, is to compare his talk to his record and compare his
talk to his action. If the American people see a consistent
disconnect between…talk and action, they’ll get that. One thing
people know about John McCain is that he walks the talk.”
Often in her speeches at colleges and businesses around the
country, Fiorina speaks on the difference between managers and
leaders, and she’s found the concept transferable to the political
world. “Management is about producing acceptable results within
known constraints and conditions,” Fiorina explained. “And that’s
what a lot of politicians do. They manage public opinion. They
manage their positions to reflect public opinion or what they
perceive to be public opinion. And they manage bureaucracies. What
leaders do is change the order of things and set an organization on
a new path….That doesn’t mean we throw out things that have
served us well, our bedrock values. But we have to accept that we
operate in a different environment today.”
John McCain, unsurprisingly, fits Fiorina’s stated bill for
leadership. Perhaps previewing how McCain will run against a
self-anointed change agent without eschewing the concept
of change in a nation squirming at the status quo like
Ritalin-deprived children in the back of a station wagon, Fiorina
struck out: “If you really want to change something you have to
understand it,” she said. “You have to know where the bodies are
buried. You have to know what levers to pull. John McCain
understands how Washington works and that’s not a downside. It’s
wonderful for Barack Obama to talk — ‘I’m going to change
Washington!’ — but, frankly, he doesn’t understand how it works.
And you can’t change some unless you know where the pressure points
are. John McCain knows all that and has demonstrated his ability to
tackle entrenched interests.”
No doubt, the picture of McCain tackling unspecified “entrenched
interests” may sound to many conservative ears somewhat akin to how
Bill Clinton’s promise to put 100,000 new cops on the street
sounded to Hunter S. Thompson when he and P.J. O’Rourke met the
future president at a Little Rock restaurant in 1992. “I was up all
night persuading Hunter this was not a personal threat,” O’Rourke
has recalled.
Nevertheless, when asked what she believed McCain’s major
economic initiatives would be, Fiorina laid out a solid palette of
free-market shades from moving forward with free-trade agreements
along the lines of the inexplicably maligned, perhaps derailed
Colombian agreement to chiding Democrats for employing “very
disturbing” protectionist rhetoric and “playing on people’s fears”
to keeping taxes low on individuals, nonexistent on the Internet
and reduced for companies spearheading next generation
innovations.
There was also feel-good talk of encouraging green technologies
and nuclear energy, restructuring unemployment programs to include
more training for workers in increasingly marginal industries as
well as reforming public education by bringing “the discipline of
competition and the power of parental choice to the education
system in a big way,” which just so happens was the topic of
Fiorina’s 1989 MIT Master’s thesis, “The Education Crisis: Business
and Government’s Role in Reform.”
UNFORTUNATELY, OUR DISCUSSION took place a few hours before
McCain’s change of heart on mortgage bailouts, so I was
unable to query Fiorina on this point. Time ran out before we could
get to foreign affairs as well. One gathers from her book she
probably has a fairly savvy take on the challenges we face: In 1969
she lived in Ghana where her father was teaching constitutional law
in the wake of revolution. “I saw how difficult building a nation
was,” she writes, “when smaller but more powerful tribal loyalties
conflicted with the larger but more abstract idea of a nation.”
It’s a timely observation, whether we’re talking about Iraq or a
fractious Republican coalition. How it will all turn out remains to
be seen, but sitting in the Hilton lobby last week it seemed fairly
obvious that McCain was lucky to have Carly Fiorina aboard.
