What is he thinking? This is an act of desperation, but I don’t get what she brings to the ticket. It’s as if he went looking for an unpleasant, unpopular person to complement his own unpopular unpleasantness. Or maybe he thinks McCain set a precedent.
Sure, it’ll bring more attention to his campaign, but it’s the kind of attention dog poop on a sidewalk brings — you make sure not to step in it.
Well, Cruz does state that Carly knows how to create jobs. Of course, they may be in Indonesia or Pakistan, but still…
One religious bigot thinks his best running mate is another religious bigot. Not surprised.
They both need a lesson in the concept that my freedom of religion means my freedom from the tenets of their religions being codified into law, which, by definition, is the establishment of a state religion…
I can hardly imagine the bubble in which these people live. They must know they will not be elected, and if so, what is the purpose of this expensive electoral exercise.
@ #3
There are plenty of legal ways to siphon campaign money into the pockets of friends and family. Winning the election is an unexpected bonus.
How could Cruz possibly be able to recognize how unpleasant that nasty woman is?
Fiorina at least ran a company semi-competently, rather a better track record than Palin.
(By all reports, HP would have needed outright good leadership, not just mediocrity.)
The best theory I’ve seen is that it’s a gamble for California. It’s already Indiana or bust. He has to win it, and if he picks a VP before then there’s a chance winning Indiana will erroneously make his VP choice look popular. Fiorina lost her bid for California Senate in the general, but won the primary, so the theory goes that if an Indiana win makes Fiorina look stronger than she really is, she might help him win enough primary voters in California to sink Trump’s first-ballot bid. The problem of course is that it looks like a desperation play (because it is) and it could backfire and cost him Indiana. Trump almost immediately tweeted a video clip of Fiorina trashing Cruz as untrustworthy, and you can bet he’ll be riding that for all it’s worth, painting their alliance as yet another ploy by the establishment to try to deny him the nomination.
I thought that the VP pick was announced at the convention, after the official nominee was named.
Isn’t this unusual that a candidate should name a VP choice before the convention, or even before he’s been named the nominee?
I’ve been saying that Hillary needs to name Julian Castro as her VP pick, but was told that such a thing wasn’t done until the convention. Do only the Democrats have rules about this?
It’s not just unusual, it’s pretty much unprecedented. It’s the earliest a VP has been chosen in half a century at least. Probably longer, if one dug deep enough. 538 went all the way back to the 70s and no VP picks went even close to this early.
besides being a poor manager of a Hi-tech company or really understanding the business there was the spying scandal the icing on cake that really ended her career at HP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_spying_scandal.
that scandal alone tells you just about all you need to know about her and why Cruz might feel comfortable with her. The announcement of his pick for VP is likely the only chance he has of getting to do that he wont be doing this again next time. He is playing like he is well liked and a great leader.
clearly not the party of Lincoln and T.R. any longer
uncle frogy
unclefrogy wrote:
Nope, but clearly they’re still the party of Nixon.
Well, I guess they have the women’s vote and the Hispanic vote all locked up then.
I guarantee that’s what they’re thinking. They really think people vote that way.
Perhaps they’re hoping to repurpose all those Dumb and Dumber posters.
First principles, Clarice.
What is the nature of the thing? It is a woman.
Who is Donald Trump going to be insulting until the Convention? A woman.
Whose votes can Cruz get during the primaries to make it to the Convention? Republican women. No voting bloc turns out more reliably than Republican women.
And now, for every stupid thing Trump says about women — can you count to a gazillion? — Cruz gets to use it against He, Trump, with Republican women in the primary.
I’d say Cruz is making the most of his opportunities.
Rachael Maddow just covered this. Basically, her take on it was that Cruz is trying to get the news coverage surrounding him to focus on anything other than the fact that he’s getting beaten like a bongo drum*. She also pointed out that the last time that a Republican candidate announced their VP pick before the convention was in 76, when Reagan was losing to Ford. Reagan announced that his VP pick was going to be Richard Schweiker. Schweiker, unlike Fiorina, was a successful politician (and also known for being a liberal Republican). And, as we all know, Reagan still lost the Republican ticket to Ford, who went on to lose the election to Carter.
*My words, not hers.
As a friend, colleague, Political Scientist, and avid feminist put it, “Everybody’s playing the woman card.” This is in light of the rumors that Sanders is considering Warren has his running mate. We then decided that Trump will name himself as his running mate because he would be great at it. Yuge! (IKYN)
grumpyoldfart @#4 wins the award of understanding why the presidential campaign is such a horse race. It’s all about the money.
numerobis @ #6
“Semi-competently”…ooh now that’s an unequivocal endorsement. “Better…than Palin” such a low, low bar even I could get over that one.
Palin would have made more sense.
That’s not saying much.
I say they are perfect for each other.
@magistramarla,
There’s no particular rule or law saying that the nominee can’t choose a running mate before the convention, though I believe technically the party doesn’t have to agree to the nominee’s choice (ultimately, it’s all dependent on the party’s rules). As microraptor notes, Reagan did this in ’76, though it was after all the primaries.
My feeling is that Cruz chose Fiorina with an eye toward a brokered convention–she’s enough of an outsider to attract some of Trump’s supporters, but won’t piss off the establishment as much.
I think themadtapper in #7 has it, but even that is a weak explanation.
The real problem is that the Republicans have been telling so many lies for so long that it is no longer possible to fathom how much they really believe what they themselves are saying. This is almost certainly a cynical move, but the motivation is hard to pick out. What does Cruz really believe about voters and about his own chances? (And what do his immediate circle of advisors believe?) It’s impossible to tell whether he views this as a desperate move or merely a strategic one, and what benefits he seriously expects to derive.
Also, is he picking Fiorina because of her actual personality and history, or because of her demographic profile? It’s certainly true that identity politics is scarily common, particularly with Baby Boomers, so “nominate a woman to get women’s votes” might be a good strategy — if it weren’t for the fact that the Democrats will (barring extraordinary unforeseen circumstances) be running a woman directly, rather than as a VP. Anyone who is dumb enough to make their candidate selection based on identity politics rather than policy and history, and who would choose “a woman” as a result, would presumably go for Clinton. But Fiorina is such a terrible candidate that it’s hard to see what she offers in any other respect — but if you’re looking for “a high-profile Republican woman” there aren’t a whole lot of choices, and Sarah Palin is a staunch Trump supporter.
(Wouldn’t the Christian Fundamentalists object to the idea of putting a woman into either slot in the ticket? Running a woman means either directly or potentially letting a woman “assume authority over a man“, and that’s one of those things they get all antsy about. But Cruz is a Christian Fundamentalist of the Fundementedist variety, so has he already found a way around that? Of course, he certainly doesn’t expect to die in office, nobody seriously expects their own mortality, but even so…)
On the other hand, from the stories coming out lately, it seems like Trump is starting to ease off on the crazy-statements-designed-to-get-free-media-time, and might actually start to issue consistent policy soon, rather than just blurting out the most outrageous thing that occurs to him. If Trump doesn’t get knocked out of the Republican nomination, I’m expecting him to make a shift towards consistency and reason (not necessarily reason to the extent of good or workable policy, mind you, just “no longer pieced together by someone on three types of psychoactive drugs and therefore constantly self-contradictory”) which will mirror Hillary Clinton’s inevitable shift back to the right. Well, okay, Trump probably won’t get saner to the same degree that Clinton is going to move right, but I still think the move is coming. He got the nutty base supporting him, and that’s enough to probably get the nomination, now it’s time to find justifications for the rest of the party to hold their noses and vote for him. It won’t take much if the opponent is Clinton.
Yeah, I’m with anthrosciguy. This is cargo-cult thinking, straight up.
Cruz wants a woman on the ticket, and Carly is the one he can nab, and he thinks it will fix his popularity problem, because women something something Hillary something something the youths something something. He doesn’t know how to court voters outside of his own narrow box, so he’ll brainlessly copy other people’s successes without understanding how popularity works or how humans decide stuff.
I would have thought he’d pick Palin, as neither of them have a filter between their brains and their mouths.
Damn, I thought it was Trump, not Cruz. Fiorina makes perfect sense, they’re both smug, self-righteous arseholes.
Cruz is simply incomprehensible, both to his audience and himself. Fiorina is just yuck. So why even try to figure out why he would pick her and the purpose of the timing. Cruz is best left by the side of the road after avoiding stepping in it.
Hello, Boris and Natasha.
Reagan’s pick of Richard Schweiker wasn’t so much about “balancing the ticket” as it was making a play for the additional delegates he needed to beat Ford. Then, as now, Pennsylvania delegates were mostly unbound. Schweiker was a Senator from… Pennsylvania.
Marcus Ranum @17
Palin would have made more sense.
There’s a sentence I never thought I’d ever hear.
Or to make himself look pleasant by comparison. Although that would require him to be completely delusional about just how unpleasant he is – Fiorina is very nasty, but not off-the-scale repulsive like Cruz, whose own family can scarecely bear physical contact with him..
Ted Cruz has his Heinlein stories muddled up. He’s probably planning to change his name to “Nehemiah Scudder” once he wins (because he figures that pretty much guarantees Christian Dominionist control of the USA until at least 2100AD), but he’s got “Revolt in 2100” mixed up with the story at the end of “Expanded Universe” where a Latina VP winds up taking over the job after the original president dies (ISTR it was a plane accident as killed him) and winds up being surprisingly competent and capable of dealing with the problems… which were afflicting the USA toward the end of the 1980s.
(I figure it’s about as plausible as all the other theories floating about. I should also note I’m an Australian who doesn’t really have a dog in this fight, so to speak).
machintelligence @ 25: I saw someone on Facebook calling it the “Disney villain ticket”.
Oh, there’s more to it than that. Sure, the campaign money is a nice thing to spread around. But the key is what comes after the election. This is their job application process for a gig on Fox (or at least Breitbart).
I think electoral-vote.com has the right idea, although it’s all just speculation:
Fiorina is a tethered goat.
If this is really the thinking behind Cruz’s decision, he’s even more deplorable than I thought, and I’m afraid he probably hasn’t hit bottom yet.
Nothing Trump has said so far has seemed to hurt him. If Cruz’s plan really is to use Fiorina like that, I doubt it’s going to work.
Larry Wilmore presented Fiorina’s creepiest moment on the “Nightly Show.” Link. Video and some text at the link. Scroll down for the video.
Re VP: The current favorite for VP candidate if Clinton gets the nomination is Julian Castro. Which means that if the Clinton/Castro ticket gets elected, and Clinton dies or is incapacitated in office, there would be two President Castros in the Western Hemisphere.