So Carly Fiorina wants to be Lieutenant Governor. Or more accurately, somebody wants the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard to be LG. Whether that person is someone who knows Fiorina, advises Fiorina, or is Fiorina is unknown. But since we like unsubstantiated gossip just as much as any group of self-respecting political bloggers, let’s think this through.
First of all, she’d be running against Senator Tom McClintock, who is almost certainly the most respected conservative officeholder in California. It’s hard to imagine the amount of money it would take Fiorina to win a closed primary. In fact, that sum probably does not exist. So she’d lose and tear the party into pieces in the process. Since nobody actually ever wants to be LG unless it’s a stepping stone to another office, this wouldn’t be the best way for Fiorina to begin her political career.
But Fiorina also represents exactly the type of candidate Republicans need to recruit and run to become a majority on California. She’s smart, she’s tough, she’s articulate, and she brings a solid set of private sector and communit service credentials to the table.
The state GOP does a lot of things well, but candidate recruitment is problematic for an organization that must represent Republicans of all ideologies. If a moderate gets mad every time the party would recruit a conservative to run, or vice versa, you’d very quickly have organizational chaos and paralysis. The CRP stays out of primaries for this reason, so it’s tough for them to do much recruitment either. That means that this process is usually self-directed, without much guidance for prospective candidates trying to make sense of California’s peculiar political universe.
So we need candidates like Fiorina, but we don’t need them to spend tens of millions of dollars to lose a primary election for an irrelevant office. What’s the answer? Run for something else….
Like State Treasurer. With Bill Simon out of that race, neither of the remaining candidates could win a general election without some very extraordinary Arnold coattails to bring them in. For very different reasons, neither of them will ever get elected to top-of-the-ticket office. Fiorina’s background in business best qualifies her for a position with economic and fiscal responsibilities and her election would send a strong message to swing voters that the GOP needs to win statewide elections in California.
A more unusual direction, but an intriguing one, would be a race for Superintendent of Public Instruction. This is a tougher suggestion for me to make personally, because I’ve always held Tim Leslie in very high regard. He’s a smart, loyal Republican who’s done excellent work throughout his career in public service. So it’s much tougher to argue that there’s a hole on the ticker here as there is in the Treasurer’s race, mainly because there isn’t.
But a Fiorina candidacy could promise to bring California’s business community back into the education debate, kicking and screaming if necessary. For all the good work being done by organizations like the California Business for Education Excellence group, the Small Schools Alliance in Los Angeles, or the Silicon Valley-based EdVoice, the employers of California are not doing nearly enough to ensure an educated workforce for the state. A high-profile CEO, particularly one with a record of involvement on these issues, could help provide some reasonable balance in California’s ongoing education policy debate in a way that a more traditional candidate (even a highly qualified one) could not.
Would Fiorina make a good candidate and officeholder? Are her principles those of the Republican Party? At this moment, there’s no way to know. If she is serious enough about entering the political arena to answer those questions, there are plenty of ways for her to do so. But a campaign for Lt. Governor next year isn’t one of them.