Carly Fiorina’s war on math: Her pixie-dust plan to balance the budget and make America perfect

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CARLY FIORINA'S WAR ON MATH
When even "Morning Joe" is laughing at you, you know you've gone wrong

GARY LEGUM


(Salon) Carly Fiorina’s campaign to be the next Republican president – or failing that, the secretary of commerce in the next Republican president’s Cabinet, or maybe the director of the Office of Management and Budget, really, she’ll take anything to feel relevant again, has she mentioned she was the first female CEO of Hewlett-Packard? – continued Wednesday with a deeply hilarious phone interview on “Morning Joe” that had the show’s panelists either laughing at her or choking on their Starbucks coffee off camera. It was hard to tell.

“Morning Joe” is as good a place as any for an appearance by a Republican presidential candidate looking for a couple of softballs at which to swing. As they so often do, the crew of MSNBC’s flagship morning show didn’t disappoint. This meant no questions about Fiorina’s claims about the Planned Parenthood videos or her deeply weird statement that the undergraduate degree in medieval history she earned at Stanford 40 years ago qualifies her to lead the fight against ISIS. And yet, even with the fat pitches the panelists grooved down the center of the plate for her, Fiorina still managed to sound as if she has no idea what she was talking about.

The whole thing is nine minutes of hilarity as Fiorina tries and fails to sound some of the populist notes that have inflated Donald Trump’s poll numbers, while also attempting to sound like a competent executive with a plan and a Beltway outsider. Does anyone buy Carly Fiorina, she of the $42 million golden parachute that HP strapped to her back when it kicked her out of the Gulfstream she made the company lease for when she had to travel, as a populist sympathetic to the small businesses being crushed by the socialist tyrant Barack Obama?

But I want to focus on one exchange, because it exemplifies the way some of the GOP candidates have been scrambling over each other like puppies in the Puppy Bowl to present ever-more-awesome economic plans. ...............(more)

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/08/carly_fiorinas_war_on_math_her_pixie_dust_plan_to_balance_the_budget_and_make_america_perfect/