Why Carly Fiorina (probably) can’t save the Republicans

The Republican party is showing all the attention span of a hyperactive toddler this primary season, moving from one shiny toy to the next. Donald Trump still dominates the nursery, like some giant plastic fire engine. But the pieces are starting to look careworn and the battery is going on the siren. The former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, now tied with Trump in some polls, is the teddy bear dragged around the playground a few times and now slumped in a corner. Fresh out of the box though is Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett Packard, gleaming amidst the gaggle of tired rivals.

At the most recent Republican debate, Fiorina wore what seemed from podium height upwards to be an electric-blue wetsuit. She was the only candidate who didn’t look like she’d been living in hotels and breakfasting on doughnuts for three months. She shot down Donald Trump for questioning whether anyone could vote for ‘that face’ and the audience went wild. She is a conservative dynamo plucked from Cecil Parkinson’s most fevered imaginings. And a friend of Benjamin Netanyahu to boot. When she was in corporate technology sales, she once turned up to a meeting with socks stuffed down her underwear to show the men she had what it took to close a deal. She tells the story proudly in her memoirs. For rich, hot-blooded Republicans, how much better can you get?

But Fiorina might not be so attractive to middle America. She speaks with the brusque confidence of the corporate CEO, often starting sentences with the phrase, ‘I am angered by…’ She is angered by a lot: hypocrisy, the tax code, environmentalists and liberals, especially liberals. She says brutal things with a tilt of the head and a bright, white smile, the kind that evil executives put on when they are firing everyone, moving jobs to China and then leaving with a giant golden parachute.