Freedom Line Blog

Carly Fiorina may not eventually win the GOP presidential nomination, but that shouldn’t necessarily be the end of her involvement in the 2016 election.

Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard CEO and one-time U.S. Senate candidate in California, is making the rounds ahead of a potential announcement that she is running for president.

Though she’s low in the polls, Fiorina is making a name for herself as Hillary Clinton’s best critic.

“The Democrats and Hillary Clinton have made gender an issue with their ridiculous ‘war on women,’” the New York Times quotes Fiorina as saying. “I think if Hillary Clinton faces a woman opponent, she will get a hitch in her swing.”

What better way to deflate the liberal meme that Republicans hate women than by nominating a conservative female to the party’s standard bearer? Fiorina is proudly pro-free market and pro-life, making her someone to watch as the GOP field takes shape.

By establishing her abilities as an able Clinton critic, Fiorina may be positioning herself to show the eventual nominee that she can go toe-to-toe with Hillary and effectively neutralize any war-on-women attacks.

Keep an eye on Fiorina. If Hillary is the Democrats’ nominee, we may see a lot more of Carly.

Politico usefully rebukes the conventional wisdom about money in politics with a look at this year’s self-financing candidates:

…

The one winner in the group is Republican businessman Ron Johnson, who beat Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), one of the Senate’s most ardent champions of campaign finance reforms that would limit the role of big money in federal races.

In Connecticut, Republican Senate nominee Linda McMahon spent $47 million of her own money. In Florida, Jeff Greene dropped $24 billion attempting to get the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. In California, Carly Fiorina invested $5.5 million out of her own accounts for a shot at the upper chamber, though that number paled in comparison to the $143 million ponied up by the GOP gubernatorial nominee, Meg Whitman. What do they all have in common? They all lost.

For the professional fretters who rent their garments in support of McCain-Feingold and gnashed their teeth over the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, there’s a valuable lesson here: money buys you the means to make your case, not the right to have that case accepted by the voters. Big money in political races can be just as much a drawback as an advantage. And if you don’t believe that, just ask the organized labor establishment, whose investment in this year’s races turned out to be a toxic asset.

Lest Freedom Line readers sink too far into despair over Jeff’s earlier post about the EPA’s transformation into a People’s Commissariat, it turns out there’s good news: it’s all to stave off the coming carbon wars. At least that’s the diagnosis of California’s taxpayer-financed parody of liberalism, Senator Barbara Boxer:

Here’s to hoping that Boxer’s opponent, Carly Fiorina, brings this up the next time she finds herself on an open mic.

Buried amidst the landslide primary victories of GOP candidates Meg Whiteman (governor) and Carly Fiorina (U.S. Senator) is a far more consequential vote.  The passage of Proposition 14, the ballot measure that abolishes partisan primaries in favor of a top-two run-off in a general election, is not the panacea its supporters claim.  Then again, many of the people who voted for it aren’t sure what it will do anyway.  From the New York Times:

That no one actually knows what the real effect of Proposition 14 will be seems almost beside the point to frustrated voters. What mattered, supporters said, is that something fundamental about politics — anything fundamental — had been changed.

As supporters celebrated, they promised to bring the so-called “top two” system to a state near you, with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the charge — though his second term, plagued by budget meltdowns and plunging popularity, was, analysts said, one of the leading motivators for the measure.

Whether the measure will empower more independent voters — who were already allowed to vote in Democratic or Republican primaries, provided they requested a ballot — remains to be seen. But what did seem certain was that California was again poised to capture the mood of the country, just as it did in 1978 with Proposition 13, which distilled widespread antitax sentiment into a cap on property taxes.

This time, it is the anger of the electorate that Californians have bottled, experts said, even if they are not totally sure what they are doing.

This kind of thoughtless voting was the same motivating factor in passing the Golden State’s term limits measure in 1990s and the electorate’s more recent decision to have an unelected commission draw legislative and congressional districts.  Like Proposition 14, both have the effect of minimizing accountability by shifting power away from publicly elected officials toward staff, lobbyists, and moneyed insiders.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that in modern California politics Proposition 14 is likely to have zero effect on which two candidates are selected to run in the general election.  For over a decade the Republican and Democratic nominations have gone to those with high name recognition and/or independent wealth.  Whitman and Fiorina had tremendous advantages as a billionaire and multi-millionaire, respectively, and benefited enormously from establishment support that cut off their opponents’ ability to raise funds.

When Proposition 14 is implemented in 2011, they still will – only this time the decisions will take place not in an open, voter decided forum, but in informal discussions among special interest groups picking their candidates and clearing the field.

So, way to go California!  By voting for less structure you’ll get less control.  Maybe next year someone will qualify a ballot measure to abolish the legislature and let every citizen decide every issue by popular vote.

What could go wrong?

San Francisco’s ktvu.com reports that all three Republican challengers to three-term California Democratic U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer are now within striking distance of defeating her, based on results of a new Field Poll.

Former Congressman Tom Campbell – the most moderate of the three Republicans – has a one point lead over Boxer.  Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, a bit more conservative, trails Boxer by a single point.  The most conservative Republican – Assemblyman Chuck Devore – trails Boxer by only four points, about the poll’s margin of error.”

Only months ago, Boxer – one of the most liberal members of the Senate – had double-digit leads over the three.  Mark DiCamillo of the Field Poll told ktvu, “there has been a sea change in perceptions,” and attributed Boxer’s precipitous decline to the economy, people fed up with incumbents and the health care debate.

DiCamillo added, “The atmospherics surrounding health care is really – I think – a detriment to Democrats right now.”