Carly Fiorina, a 2016 Republican presidential candidate, is hovering one step away from the “Where are they now?” file. She might even replace former RINO superstar Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) as its newest entry. Fiorina recently surfaced to tell leftist publication The Atlantic that she will be voting for Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden in November.
“I think this moment calls upon Joe Biden to be a leader,” Fiorina told the progressive media outlet in an interview published June 25. “I am encouraged that Joe Biden is a person of humility and empathy and character. I think he’s demonstrated that through his life.”
It’s hardly surprising that Fiorina, who positioned herself as an alternative to President Trump in the 2016 GOP field and became the subject of harsh personal attacks on her looks from the unscripted outsider, would be voting for an old Swamp denizen such as Biden. Fiorina badly misjudged the Republican voting base’s palpable yearning for authentic change four years ago. She hoped to win by offering boilerplate GOP-lite talking points presented by a brassy “female business executive” only to be soundly thrashed by a populist upstart who went on to topple the Republican establishment’s decades-old stranglehold on party presidential nominees.
Words Without Meaning
If anything, Fiorina’s comments may give the president a boost within his ranks. As a good number of 2016 change voters express dissatisfaction with the pace of reform under Trump, Fiorina’s interview with The Atlantic serves as a reminder of what the GOP used to be before the current president burst onto the scene. As she did four years earlier, Fiorina freely indulges in vacuous phraseology about “problem-solving” and “principles and character” that gives no hint whatsoever of posing any serious threat to the status quo of Washington politics.
Fiorina’s lack of substance shines through in the interview. When The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere takes pains to point out her supposedly staunch pro-life beliefs, she promptly uses the topic to meander into a pat discourse on racism:
“And I think abortion is used discriminantly against poor people and people of color—but if we care about life that’s unborn, we need to care about life that’s in this world too. And that means we actually have to make progress on criminal-justice reform and police reform. And we have to stand up and recognize systemic racism and structural racism and make real progress on that, because too many lives that are here are being wasted and ignored and dismissed and overlooked.”
From there, things get worse. When Dovere quizzed her on Biden’s move toward fewer restrictions on abortion, despite being a devout Catholic, Fiorina responded: “I think this is a great example of an opportunity to lead rather than just playing politics. He could do that. He could lead. He could problem-solve. He could find common ground on a bipartisan basis.”
Biden has entirely capitulated to the pro-abortion consensus in the Democrat Party for purely political reasons while still claiming to faithfully adhere to a religion that strongly condemns the killing of the unborn. Yet Fiorina amazingly describes this portrait in submission to progressive orthodoxy as a sign of the former VP’s ability to “lead” and find “common ground.” The sheer hollowness of her words is more telling than the lack of conservative principle on display here.
Soul of a Career Politician
Another interesting exchange involved Fiorina’s rebuke of her former running mate, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Surely you remember the Never-Trumpers’ last-ditch Cruz-Fiorina Dream Team? Fiorina is not pleased to see her old tag-team partner currently backing Trump in the U.S. Senate. “I don’t excuse it. I don’t. It disappoints me,” she told Dovere. “I’ve been public in my disappointment about how few politicians have been willing to stand up and speak on values and principles. But I understand it if you’re in politics, sadly.”
It’s challenging to take Fiorina’s hectoring about “values” seriously when only moments earlier she had slung this mush about Biden:
“And yet, I think when Biden talks about the soul of the nation, I think what he’s talking about is values and principles and character. Principles like coequal branches of government, principles like problem-solving should be a collaborative process, a bipartisan process. I think all those things matter.”
Fiorina devotes some time to speaking against Washington corruption and the way large corporations “have used the power of big government to make their businesses bigger and more powerful and profitable.” She asserts that the problems affecting our nation have “been around for a long time and politicians have argued about [them] for a long time. But it’s not getting better. And so now we need problem-solving and leadership, not politics as usual.”
Her solution to this intractable scenario? Elect the man who has been in Washington, D.C. for almost the entirety of his adult life and who will turn 80 in the White House if he wins the presidency.
“Donald Trump is many things, but he’s not a successful businessman,” Fiorina declares in another demonstration that she still holds an enormous personal grudge against the man who vanquished her in 2016. Carly Fiorina may or may not be many things, but in the political world, she is a card-carrying member of a still-breathing Swamp Uniparty that has Joe Biden as its champion in 2020.
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