McCain's advisers - Carly Fiorina

Want to know why McCain chooses to push certain issues and ignore others? Some of it, to be sure, is McCain's own opinions. But no one has all the reasoned opinions a modern Presidential candidate requires to run for office, and even the opinions the candidate has need to be evaluated by experts to see if they are ready for prime time. So who are McCain's trusted advisers?

As I find reports on them I intend to post descriptions of the advisers who provide or flesh out McCain's positions. Keep in mind that Condi Rice, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove were George Bush's closest advisers before he was elected in 2000 and they have had a massive effect on how America operates since then.

From Elizabeth Bumiller at The New York Times we get this description of Carly S. Fiorina, the ousted ex-CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

Ms. Fiorina’s official title is chairwoman of the Republican National Committee’s “Victory ’08” committee dedicated to electing Mr. McCain as president, and she is typically described as an economic adviser to the candidate. To some extent, she is. But Mr. McCain’s campaign advisers say her real role within their testosterone-heavy circle matters more: A high-profile female face for a candidate whose support among women lags substantially behind that of his Democratic rivals.

“She has a great feeling for the economy, for technology and probably what women think about these things, and she’s wired in,” said Thomas J. Perkins, a pioneer venture capitalist and a leader on the Hewlett-Packard board in Ms. Fiorina’s ouster. (In the past, Mr. Perkins acknowledged, “we’ve had words and we’ve sort of attacked each other in print.”)

In turn, a number of Republicans say Ms. Fiorina is using the McCain campaign to rebuild her image after her explosive tenure at Hewlett-Packard. They also say it is hard to see why a woman widely criticized for mismanaging one of Silicon Valley’s legendary companies is advising and representing a candidate who acknowledged last year that he did not understand the economy as well as he should.

Ms. Fiorina is clearly running to rebuild her own reputation even as she works to get John McCain elected President.

Her qualifications as an economic expert are limited to the two or three courses in economics one gets in an MBA and her time as one of the privileged few who become CEO of a fortune 500 company. CEO's are not necessarily experts in anything. They are people who have attained a very high social rank, primarily by pleasing those they work for.

But once a person in America achieves the rank of CEO (or Senator, for that matter), their opinions become treated as though they matter. In fact there is little evidence that for most of them they are anything more than another celebrity who is famous for being famous. Carly Fiorina is one of these people.

Other sources of information on Carly include:

• Carly Fiorina Enterprises


• Forbes on Carleton "Carly" S. Fiorina in 2004


• Fiorina out, HP stock soars February 10, 2005


• The Rise & Fall Of Carly Fiorina Feb. 10, 2005


• Carly Fiorina: McCain's Environmental Policy Is Distinct From Bush's — Really May 11, 2008


• Carly Fiorina As McCain's VP? April 24, 2008

So it's not like Carly has any real value other than her gender, her status as a fired CEO and her celebrity status. But I guess that's all McCain can get. No doubt she'll lean on ex-Senator, Libertarian Economist and current Vice Chairman of the Swiss banking firm UBS Phil Gramm for real economic knowledge.