The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  “My male colleagues never did that to me again,” she said years later. (She also noted, with a satisfied grin, that despite the men’s best efforts, they couldn’t persuade a single stripper to mount their table as long as a lady was present.)

  Sure, Fiorina could have caused a stink about this slight from her male coworkers. She could have reported the lot of them to human resources, or, if she was feeling especially ambitious, she could have called up Gloria Allred and held a press conference outside the Capitol announcing a multimillion-dollar sexual harassment suit against her employers. But she believed the only way for a woman to win in corporate America—and to really take pride in the win—was to refrain from working the refs and instead play twice as hard as anyone else on the field.

  And that’s what she did, starting out as a secretary for a real estate company, and eventually working her way up from sales to vice president at AT&T. In 1995, she managed the spin-off of a new company, Lucent, where she launched an aggressive $90 million rebranding campaign that transformed the humdrum telephone manufacturer into a sensation of the high-tech new economy—and made her into a corporate star. During her tenure, Lucent’s revenues increased a whopping 58 percent, and Fiorina was soon offered the job of CEO at Hewlett-Packard. At the press conference announcing her hire at HP, reporters peppered her with questions about what her ascent meant for womankind, and she replied with a curt rejection of the premise.

  “There is no glass ceiling,” she said.

  But now, at the head of one of the biggest tech companies in America, Fiorina felt empowered to start reaching down and pulling her fellow corporate sisters a few rungs up the ladder. As she studied the sprawling organizational charts at HP, she found that despite the company’s rather vocal claim to enlightenment and diversity, the patterns of advancement for women were not much better than at other companies. “We had a lot of women coming in at the entry levels, and then they sort of thinned out at middle management, and by the time you got to senior levels of business they weren’t prepared.”

  To rectify the problem, she told her direct reports at HP that, going forward, for every manager-level job opening in the company, they would have to put in the time and effort to produce a list of potential hires that was not composed exclusively of their pasty-faced drinking buddies. “We didn’t have quotas, we didn’t have goals, but we insisted that we consider a diverse set of qualified candidates for every job,” she told me.

  The process didn’t go smoothly at first. “Initially, what would happen is, people would come back and say, ‘I can’t find a woman,’ or, ‘I can’t find an African American,’ and I would say, ‘Yes you can. Go back and look.’ And inevitably they would.”

  But even as Fiorina embarked on a mission to empower Silicon Valley women, she was careful to couch the rationale in terms of dollars and cents, not right and wrong. “Enlightened managers and leaders don’t think about this as an issue of diversity,” she would tell me later. “They think about it as a business imperative. It’s a business imperative to take advantage of all the talent that exists. It’s a business imperative to hear different points of view and perspectives around the table because when everybody thinks alike, you’re going to miss something really important.”

  Fiorina’s five-and-a-half-year tenure at HP was marked by tumult, as the dotcom bubble burst and panicked board members battled her at every turn. Even as she presided over a 50 percent drop in the company’s stock prices and massive layoffs amid industry-wide calamity, she engineered a controversial acquisition of Compaq, which would ultimately bring her a measure of vindication when markets deemed the merger a success. At the same time, though, Fiorina’s newfound status as a celebrity CEO in high heels drew an onslaught of gendered indignities that chipped away at her grand ideals of a gender-blind corporate world. And by the time her board ousted her in 2005, she was ready to call out the sexism of Silicon Valley and the media.

  In a score-settling 2006 memoir, Tough Choices, she wrote about a BusinessWeek editor whose first interview question was, “Is that an Armani suit you’re wearing?” She debunked insulting rumors that she traveled full-time with a hairdresser and a makeup artist, and that she had spent thousands of dollars to build a pink marble bathroom in her office. She recounted frequent descriptions of herself in the press as “flashy” and “glamorous” and “diamond studded”—and expressed dismay at speculation that she never had children because she was “too ambitious.”

  “I was routinely referred to as either a ‘bimbo’ or a ‘bitch’—too soft or too hard, and presumptuous, besides,” Fiorina wrote.

  She also said she had gone to great lengths to prevent the media from dwelling on her gender.

  “Whenever I agreed to an interview, I’d set ground rules: I won’t talk about the glass ceiling, I won’t talk about myself, I’ll only talk about the company,” she wrote. “Over the years that followed I turned down numerous requests from Glamour, People, Vogue, Diane Sawyer, Oprah Winfrey, and more. These were great ventures and personalities, but they weren’t interested in the company; they were interested in me.”

  That may have been a sound strategy for a corporate chiefstress, but the world of conservative politics awaited her—and there, Fiorina would learn, getting people interested was the whole ball game.

  In 2008, Fiorina, who had been busying herself with philanthropy since leaving HP, signed on to the McCain campaign as a fund-raiser and surrogate. Soon she became a go-to talking head whenever it was necessary to defend Sarah Palin in the media.

  It was clear to Fiorina from the very beginning that the Wasilla-bred veep candidate was blazing a new path for conservative women when Palin praised Hillary Clinton at her very first rally for having “left eighteen million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America.”

  “It turns out that the women of America aren’t finished yet,” Palin had declared to an electrified conservative audience that day in Dayton, Ohio. “And we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all!”

  This was not the sort of language conservatives were used to applauding, but Palin made it work. And as the election progressed, the McCain campaign took the strategy further, deflecting attacks on Palin’s lack of experience and unsteady grasp of policy issues with full-throated accusations of sexism.

  Within weeks of Palin’s pick, the McCain campaign was up with a TV ad in swing states depicting a desperate Obama, his celebrity waning, who had “lashed out” at the running mate—“dismissed her as ‘good-looking’… said she was doing ‘what she was told’… How disrespectful.”

  When Us Weekly splashed “Babies, Lies, and Scandal” across its front page, alluding to rumors that Palin had faked her pregnancy with her four-month-old son, Trig, in order to cover up her own daughter’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy, Cindy McCain called the magazine’s antics “insulting” and “outlandish,” and declared, “The media has decided to treat her differently… I believe, because she’s a woman.” And when a watchdog group filed a campaign finance complaint over Palin’s infamously pricey wardrobe, she deftly compared herself to Hillary Clinton: “Do you remember the conversations that took place about her? Say, superficial things that they don’t talk about with men, her wardrobe and her hairstyles, all of that? That’s a bit of that double standard.”

  In a movement that had long rejected liberals who couched every point and counterpoint in the culture wars with that much-loathed argument ender “As a woman…,” Palin had decided to seize the rhetorical weapons of political correctness, and she was brandishing them to great effect. Conservatives delighted in how Palin gleefully beat the Left at its own game, and she quickly became the biggest star on the right—far outshining the party’s white male septuagenarian nominee.

  Fiorina was not especially close with Palin, nor was she involved in crafting the campaign’s strategy, but she got to see its success up close, and occasionally got in on the action herself. On the campaign’s behalf, she appeared on MSNBC to te
ll Andrea Mitchell that Tina Fey’s caricature of Palin on Saturday Night Live was “sexist” and “disrespectful in the extreme.” And Fiorina, too, took to comparing the sexism the media aimed at Palin with that suffered by Hillary Clinton. “Both of these women are courageous, out there on a firing line,” she said. “And they are spoken about in a way that we would never speak about a man.” Fiorina complained that the media treated Palin like a “nice little girl, a good show horse, but not qualified.”

  But even as Palin delighted the Republican masses with her charismatic assaults on liberal hypocrisy and sexism, a low-pitched, little-noticed grumble persisted throughout the 2008 election among the elites in the conservative commentariat, who worried that the fresh new face of the party was buying into the Left’s framing of American gender politics to score a few cheap points. Writing for the esteemed conservative City Journal, Heather Mac Donald mocked Palin’s veep pick as “a diversity ploy” full of “hackneyed feminist bromides.” “I thought that conservatives scoffed at the idea that American society systematically blocks accomplished women from advancement,” she wrote. “It’s a sad day when Republicans decide to match the Democratic predilection for chromosomal consciousness, since there will be no turning back.”

  These complaints would only grow louder once the election ended and Palin expanded her trademark politics of identity and aggrievement. When a 2009 Newsweek cover featured Palin, hip popped and clad in running shorts, she blasted her portrayal as “sexist,” “unfortunate,” and “oh-so-expected by now.” During the 2010 midterms, she traveled the country anointing a cast of conservative candidates she referred to as “mama grizzlies”—Tea Party moms awoken to the ails of Obama’s America—as the ones who could “take this country back.”

  “You don’t want to mess with moms who are rising up,” she warned. “If you thought pit bulls were tough, you don’t want to mess with mama grizzlies.”

  Remarkably, Palin even flirted with embracing the f word: feminism, which had long functioned as a sociopolitical profanity in conservative circles. In a May 2010 speech in front of the pro-life political group the Susan B. Anthony List, Palin declared that she and her fellow mama grizzlies would champion “an emerging, conservative, feminist identity.”

  This was not taken to kindly in the overwhelmingly male corridors of the conservative elite. The columnist George Will fretted that Palin’s rise—and the model she was presenting to a new breed of Republican women—had become a “problem” for conservatism. Charles Krauthammer chimed in that Palin was dangerous to the movement because “when populism becomes purely anti-intellectual, it can become unhealthy and destructive.” And the Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash lashed out at Palin in a blog post for the Daily Caller, dubbing her an “impish little media-bias monitor,” and demanding to know, “When did conservatives turn into such a whiny lot of needy, politically correct meter maids, issuing citations for every perceived slight?” He called on the Palinistas to “sack up” and “quit being what you’ve always professed to despise, which is a bunch of thin-skinned weenies who take grievous offense at any and all provocations.”

  But for all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from think tank scolds and crotchety bloggers, the rank and file of the conservative movement ate up Palin’s shtick—and her success helped spawn a new generation of Republican women who drew unabashedly on the power of their gender to sell their message and fend off criticism. When the gossip site Gawker published an anonymous account from a man who claimed to have had a one-night stand with a Palin-backed Delaware Senate candidate named Christine O’Donnell, her campaign stoked national outrage with a statement decrying the report as “another example of the sexism and slander that female candidates are forced to deal with.” And in an ugly gubernatorial primary in South Carolina that year, candidate Nikki Haley fought off eleventh-hour accusations of adultery from local political foes with Palin’s help by recasting the charges as a desperate, flailing attempt by the Palmetto State’s good-ol’-boys network to keep a reformer—and a woman—out of office. The line worked, and Haley won the primary handily, winding up on the cover of Newsweek as “The Face of the New South” four months before she was even elected.

  Fiorina differed in meaningful ways from the rest of the mama grizzly crop, but her 2010 Senate candidacy ensured that she was often lumped in with the other women in Palin’s roving pack of grizzlies. And while Fiorina ultimately lost her race, that election cycle saw enough successes that it cemented the new strategy.

  On June 30, 2014, Fiorina announced the formation of the Unlocking Potential Project, a political action committee that she would lead to help the Republican Party appeal to female voters ahead of the midterm elections. The GOP was, of course, already lousy with Washington-based outreach initiatives of this sort. The party’s dreadful performance among women in 2012 had created an appetite among donors and politicos for new gender-gap closers to throw money at, and a small group of enterprising Republicans had responded with enthusiastically acronymed organizations. The National Republican Congressional Committee had launched something called Project GROW (Growing Republican Opportunities for Women), designed to recruit and groom potential female candidates, and former George W. Bush aide Marlene Colucci was now at the helm of RightNOW Women PAC, which aimed to draw young women into the GOP fold. Fiorina’s group distinguished itself with a focus on building and organizing female activist groups in battleground states with competitive Senate races, like Iowa, New Hampshire, and Virginia.

  The most immediate result of Unlocking Potential, however, was that it provided Fiorina with a vehicle for staying at the forefront of the urgent intraparty discussion over how to appeal to women. She strongly believed that the only way her party would ever win back women voters was to elevate conservative spokeswomen like herself. Republicans wouldn’t get anywhere as long as the national debate over so-called women’s issues was taking place, as it was in 2012, between the savvy message mongers on the left who came up with “war on women” and the foot-in-mouth morons on the right like Todd Akin, a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri who became the face of conservative misogyny after musing on television that women couldn’t get impregnated by “legitimate rape.”

  And so Fiorina assembled a small political team and went about crisscrossing the country, pitching her cause and herself to elite Republican donors and power brokers, and stumping for women like Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst. Everywhere she went, her simple message stayed the same. All issues were women’s issues. Women were worse off under Obama. Republicans had the answers. And most popular of all: liberals, not conservatives, were waging the real war on women.

  But something funny was happening as she spent the election standing up for her party’s female candidates: prominent Republican men kept urging her to run for president. It started in August, when Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House Speaker and emeritus Sunday morning talking head, pulled her aside backstage at the American Legislative Exchange Council meeting in Dallas and told her she would make a great addition to the 2016 field. He wouldn’t be the last one. Elite Republican fund-raisers who had already committed their efforts and dough to Jeb Bush if he got in the race nevertheless pushed Fiorina to toss her hat in the ring as well. Ditto Chris Christie’s donor crowd. The more the merrier, they said. The party needed her voice, they said.

  Even Mitt Romney, in a private conversation just weeks before he began his own public flirtation with a third campaign, told Fiorina she should enter the primaries.

  “I’m not running, but no matter what I do, you should run,” he told her with typically Romneysian hedging.

  Fiorina and her small political team were savvy enough to know why all these otherwise 2016-committed Republicans were clamoring for her to enter the race. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton’s coronation as the nominee seemed all but certain, and so far the prospective Republican field was composed entirely of men. Everyone felt the inevitable barrage of media question
s coming.

  Why can’t Republicans field a serious woman challenger for the presidency? they would demand to know. What does it say about the GOP that the primaries are so lacking in estrogen?

  Fiorina’s presence in the 2016 primaries would undercut that damaging line of questioning and prevent the nightmare image of a debate stage filled with Republican men, as moderators baited them into musing about the mommy wars or abortion or birth control. What’s more, her ties to the GOP’s more staid, responsible business wing and her party-wide reputation for being a good soldier unprone to mischief making meant that she was unlikely to make any serious trouble or cause any problems for the top tier candidates. She would, most of the likely candidates believed, spend the primaries parading around Iowa and New Hampshire, putting on her GOP girl-power show and bashing Hillary—all while the real candidates slugged it out for the nomination. Heck, if she really caught on, they might actually even put her on their veep short list when the time came.

  The underlying belief that pervaded this thinking, of course, was that Fiorina didn’t have even a remote chance of winning. No one in the party believed she would be a real threat; she would be a cheerleader dressed up as a player—acting like a candidate, but truly just there for moral support while the real candidate slugged it out for the nomination.

  Fiorina understood that this was how her party saw her, but she didn’t let it deter her. After her bruising defeat in the California Senate race, her search for postelection solace had led her to where many also-rans before her had ended up: the comforting belief that campaigns can stand for something greater than winning or losing.