Despite being mathematically eliminated from winning the GOP presidential nomination outright, Ted Cruz will reportedly announce at a rally in Indiana today that Carly Fiorina, his former rival for the GOP nomination, will be his vice presidential running mate if he is able to pull out a victory at this summer’s convention.
Fiorina launched her political career after the board of Hewlett-Packard fired her as CEO after she “almost destroy[ed] the company” in a tenure that included mass layoffs, outsourcing jobs, illicit trade with Iran and a golden parachute for herself.
While she didn’t succeed in her 2010 bid for a U.S. Senate seat in California, she won national notoriety for her bizarre remarks about climate change, hostility to gay marriage and the baffling “demon sheep” ad she ran against her primary opponent.
After losing her job as CEO and losing her Senate race, Fiorina spent time on the conservative speaking circuit and then launched a presidential bid, positioning herself as a conservative female alternative to Hillary Clinton while at the same time decrying Clinton for using gender identity politics.
She emerged as an outspoken opponent of abortion rights, using her platform to fib about abortion statistics and denounce a nonexistent Planned Parenthood video, which apparently no one besides Fiorina has ever seen. In one bizarre incident, Fiorina’s campaign reportedly “ambushed” a group of children visiting a botanical garden to use them in a photo-op for an anti-abortion speech.
The multimillionaire former CEO also raised eyebrows when she told Glenn Beck that “only the wealthy, the powerful, the big and the well-connected” have prospered while “all the rest of us are getting crushed,” and used bogus statistics about women in the workplace to deflect from her opposition to equal pay legislation.
Towards the end of her foundering campaign, Fiorina resorted to criticizing Hillary Clinton astoo ambitious to be president and attacking her marriage. She also went after Cruz for his role in the government shutdown and “saying whatever he needs to say to get elected.”
With this record of insults and false attacks, Fiorina is a great match for Cruz.
