Carly Fiorina may be the most important presidential candidate who will not win the nomination.
Hillary Clinton’s supportive national media is prepared to deflect serious criticism of her pay-to-play foreign policy scheme, Benghazi gun-running and sordid past offenses as mere chauvinism. Carly Fiorina takes that away from them, so they’ll have to “protect” their candidate with a challenging new set of narratives designed to impugn the character of Fiorina.
CNN’s Carol Costello is among the first to test the waters by declaring Fiorina’s presidential bid is “turning into this weird ‘Girl-Fight’” With Hillary Clinton.
“Weird Girl-Fight.”
That speaks volumes about the left’s consternation over a successful, articulate woman competently reminding Americans of Hillary’s professional duplicities and personal accumulation of astounding wealth obviously in concert with foreign interests.
They can’t call Carly a misogynistic Republican male, so what do they call her?
Do they call her a hair-pulling “girl fighter?”
Do they change the narrative to neutralize her gender?
CNN, NBC or MSNBC might readily report, “Carly Fiorina tried desperately to impugn Hillary’s character by reminding viewers Hillary’s work on the Watergate investigation was characterized by her boss and fellow Democrat Jerry Zeifman as deceitful.”
While Fiorina quotes Zeifman, who said, “(Hillary) was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality,” MSNBC will take you to Chris Matthews, who will explain Fiorina has an oddly mannish appearance and self-identifies as a female running as an alleged female candidate.
Or would that be more like Ed Schultz’ style?
The Media Research Center, a conservative media monitoring organization, reports, “Hillary’s Twitter launch on April 12 was received with words like “sleek,” “savvy,” “trending,” “electrifying,” and “approachable.”  She was packaged by the press exactly as she wanted it: a humble “champion of everyday Americans.Compare that to the Ted Cruz launch on March 23. These words framed the introduction: “scary,” “dangerous,” “slimy,” “firebrand,” “rigid,” “uncompromising,” “hardline,” “extremist,” “flamethrower.”
Depending on your political perspective, any of those words could represent either candidate. The national press reveals their political preference with the words they choose. Liberals and conservatives have known this for decades. Social media and the internet memory banks simply document and store all of this now for easy retrieval.
Carly gave us a good idea of her fighting style at CPAC, the conservative political action conference, during which she said, “Like Mrs. Clinton, I too have traveled the globe. Unlike Mrs. Clinton, I know that flying is an activity, not an accomplishment.”
“I have met Vladimir Putin, and I know his ambition will not be detoured by a gimmicky red, reset button.”
Carly sounds like she’s ready for a thrown-down debate. She is right to question the millions that have flowed into the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments, Hillary’s hypocrisy when it comes to human rights and her refusal to answer basic questions about her own office’s equal pay standards.
Hillary is likely prepared to counter each of her known offenses.
The question is, “How many layers of scandals can she deflect before people realize that her offenses are so many and so serious that Democrats need to find an alternative to ‘The One Who Says It Is Her Time?’”
Contact Rick at rick@wdel.com, or follow him on Twitter @Jensen1150WDEL