Carly Fiorina is the Perfect Republican Spokesperson

Watching the Sunday morning shows, I was struck by how perfect a choice Carly Fiorina is as a spokesperson for the McCain campaign and the Republican party.

The Republicans are, smartly, trying to put a powerful, impressive woman at the front of their party in order to attract disaffected female voters who might look to the GOP after the democrats fail to nominate Hillary. But who is Carly Fiorina? She is George W Bush in a pants suit.

Ms. Fiorina came to prominence during the “Dot Com Boom” as an executive at telecommunications/Internet equipment maker Lucent Technologies. With a prominent roll in marketing, Ms Fiorina helped introduce the concept of vendor financing to Lucent. Vendor financing was the practice of extending lines of credit to tech start-ups who needed Lucent’s equipment but couldn’t afford to pay for it. The logic was to capture market share with these start-ups who would rapidly expand their networks and, as a result, their need for Lucent equipment.

AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION PORTION OF THE BLOG: Can anyone out there tell me what is wrong with the concept of extending lines of credit to people who can’t afford them?

<>

<>

You guessed it! Those people will–in an overwhelming majority–default on their obligations. (see: current housing crisis). And that’s just what happened. Lucent flooded the market with their own equipment as these debtors had to liquidate their assetsm thus depressing prices. Further, Lucent had to restate previous earning as their accounts receivable department. . . well. . .never received anything from these bankrupt start-up. And, even worse, Lucent had to drastically restate their forecasted earnings as those were built upon the expectation of these half-baked start-ups flourishing.

The stock of the tech titan was reduced to pennies per share. Today, Lucent is no more. (By comparison, Lucent’s main competitor, Cisco, continues to thrive.)

But none of this mattered to Ms. Fiorina who took the top spot at Hewlett-Packard before these indigent chickens came home to roost. Lucent had yet to restate these earnings when she was offered top spot at HP.

She rode into HP on a white horse. Later, she would be chased out by angry mobs carrying torches.

Fiorina’s signature move at HP was to acquire Compaq, thereby combining the #2 and #3 manufacturers of PCs in the market (Dell being #1). Such a move was geared towards efficiencies–combine two large players in the same industry, eliminate redundant resources (staff, buildings, marketing dollars) and all of a sudden you have a lean, mean monster with higher margins.

Many, including Hewlett’s grandson, fought the move, wanting the Company instead to move up-market. In other words, they wanted HP to focus on their higher margin products such as their printers. Fiorina wanted to focus on the PC business–a largely commodotized market with lower margins and higher competitive & pricing pressures. After a long proxy fight to get the acquisition approved, Fiorina had her way.

Within a few months of the acquisition, the merger was an abject failure and the stock dropped more than 60%, . Carly was chased out of town–and with only a $21 Million severance to show for it. Poor Carly.

Now she is working for the Republican party and it appears a perfect marriage for the following reasons:

* She has experience destroying jobs, not creating them. (see: tax breaks for offshore outsourcing)

* She has no long term vision or eye for innovation to keep a venture vital and establish market leadership (see Bush administration, energy policy, foreign debt, devaluation of the dollar)

* No matter how big a disaster she creates, she is personnally enriched by each experience (see: George Bush’s oil ventures, Iraq war, Haliburton)

* She is a font of horrendous ideas, none of which hurt–or are paid for–by either her, her associates or her circle of friends but create tremendous burderns for others (see: lower & middle class families bearing brunt of war casualties, Bush administration being the administration of draft dodgers, lower & middle class being ignored by economic policy)

* She is incompetent (see all above references)

If the Republicans wanted to get a high profile woman on their campaign, they should have asked Meg Whitman, the CEO of eBay. She smart, innovative and full of common sense. Ms. Whitman has created enormous wealth, thousands of jobs and generally enriched those in her constituency. Unfortunately, she is not available: unlike Carly, she is still wanted at her company.

Tags: mccain, republicans, John, campaign, fiorina, carly, technology, george bush, presidential, computers, meg whitman, hewlett packard, eBay, HP