With Friends Like That...

I've been wanting to say something about Carly Fiorina since she became involved with the McCain campaign. I lived near Sacramento for several years and my next door neighbor worked for Hewlett Packard. I don't remember exactly what his title was but he was a mid-level manager in product development and he traveled to Denver frequently and occasionally to France. The period we were neighbors was from 1992 until 2001.
Our homes were on 3 acre parcels with distance between and I also traveled a lot so we didn't speak regularly but over the years we had many over the back fence type conversations.
I clearly remember that he had little use for Carly Fiorina. She became CEO of Hewlett Packard in July of 1999 and I left the area in April of 2001 but in that short period he shared his criticisms many times about what she had done to the company. Generally he blamed her for how bad things had become.
Of course to be fair, this is anecdotal information and it is entirely possible that he was on the wrong end of some reorganization or something. But from his vehemence I took away that there was something to his complaints.
There are other indications that she was not as skilled as she could have been. One thing is that the company stock was cut in half from the time she arrived until the time she left. Again to be fair the technology bubble burst during this time. But Hewlett Packard isn't exactly a risk prone dot-com company and Fiorina did not leave until 2005. She had the time necessary to affect a recovery.
But perhaps the strongest indication that stockholders were not pleased with her is that when she announced her resignation the stock jumped 7%.
In fact there is plenty of evidence that she was at minimum divisive and a highly controversial figure.
Fast forward to yesterday and we see that she still possesses some of those same characteristics. She said that Gov. Palin was unqualified to be CEO of a major corporation. No doubt this was a strange comment but then she tried to fix it by saying that none of the candidates for VP or President were qualified. Unbelievable. Who is she working for anyway?
She has said other odd things but this one might just take the cake. This goes directly to the 2008 election gaffe hall of fame. I'll put this on par with Gedaldine Ferraro saying that the only reason Sen. Obama is where he is today (around the time he became the presumptive democratic nominee) is because he is black. Or call it neck and neck with McCain economic adviser, Sen. Gramm saying, you've heard of mental depression, this is mental recession...we have sort of become a nation of whiners. Though for my money the real doozy award goes to another McCain adviser, Charles Black, who said about Gov. Palin's lack of foreign policy experience, "She's going to learn national security at the foot of the master for the next four years, and most doctors think that he'll be around at least that long.
So once again I have some questions. Why on earth would he pick Carly Fiorina and what does this say about Sen. McCain? What does this say about who he would select to fill his cabinet?
I got the feeling that had she continued her thought that it may of sounded something like, hell, I couldn't even run a major corporation, you think these bozo's can?