Carly Fiorina Should Challenge Barbara Boxer

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 8/12/09

What is needed is an entirely new conceptualization and a business plan.

The salon journalists and late night pundits who see ideas of governance as issues of style, like the new Versace line or the latest dish at Chez Panisse, have done a great disservice to the republic this last year in demonizing Alaskan Sarah Palin.

But on the other hand, this past year has been most innovative as we have seen a resurgence of grass roots, Jacksonian style and Jeffersonian ideals of governance. This is related to the pundit’s angst and furthers their contempt, because change is at hand and they are not part of it because change does not come top down, from the White House and its associated TV producers and press reps as they would like it. It comes out of nowhere.

This year marks the critical change. This year marks a new beginning if conservatives can first acknowledge it and second, manage it. And time is right for it. When government and media converge to singular effect as they have done with Obama as in no other time in our history, the result, in a country as vast and diverse as ours, suggests a game show. “Cash for Clunkers” is the appropriate name the novelty economics to come out of a campaign that was widely compared to American Idol. Even loyalist Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post today compares Obama’s health plan to “Deal or No Deal.”

The new century still has not started yet. The “change” touted by Obama was a return to the past. A turn back to industrial state economics of the 1930s at a time when less than 30% of American economy is involved in manufacturing and over 80% is made up of small businesses. We are getting to the end of things and as loyalists like Maureen Dowd begin to turn on their man in the White House, not far below the surface is the Democrats’ fatal and pathetic yearning for Bill. Hillary’s African tantrum this week is said to have been half caused by Bill Clinton scheming with his bros Bing and Terry McAuliffe in LA. Staging a comeback, no doubt, like Elvis in the god suit in Las Vegas.

To the elite who have never ventured on the ground past the Hudson, Palin is an Alaskan fish wife and Texas governor Rick Perry and Southern governors Mark Sanford, Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour are nothing but Southern White Trash and scheming militia. The language of regional hate and discrimination is as pronounced today as racial and anti-Semitic caricature was in the 1930s and 1940s.

But Carly Fiorina, as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, has charted waters acceptable and allowable to the corporate paradigm of the New York elite. Let’s see what she has to say. She is said to be drawing near a positive decision about running against Barbara Boxer in California’s upcoming senate election.

Because California is falling apart. A constitutional convention is at hand and there is a strong movement to divide the state in two, which will have strong repercussions in places like New York, New Hampshire and Virginia, where the city folk have found the demographics and the numbers to commandeer the general will of the vast attached rural populations. This same division has already been proposed here in New Hampshire.

California is the canary in the mine suggesting danger for the rest of the country. There is a free and independent New West Republican movement at hand – Romney sees it but may not be able to carry it. McCain may be father figure to this if only because they listen to him in New York. But Perry, Sanford, Jindal, Barbour and Palin are the original forces behind this new approach.

It needs now to gain traction before the press kills it. And we need to hear more from a systematic and analytic thinker like Fiorina. Because both parties today in power in California are failures. We need to begin again and we need to begin again in California.