“While the point is to win, of course—the goal is to win—there is no value in the race unless you’re making a set of arguments, and a set of points that you actually believe in and that you actually think people need to hear,” she would later explain to me. “I mean, I will run to win… But I think it’s important that my perspective, my experience, and my voice are in this process.”
By the end of 2014, Fiorina was ready to start actively preparing for a presidential run. She expanded her political team, bringing on the talented Sarah Isgur Flores from the Republican National Committee to help with communications, and told them to start laying the groundwork for a campaign. Her hired guns weren’t quite willing to acknowledge that Fiorina was effectively positioning herself as a token—they believed that doubts about her electability were simply symptomatic of a lack of “electoral imagination”—but Fiorina was clear-eyed about her role. She was willing to play the partisan cheerleader as long as it meant her message got the attention from the rest of the team that it deserved.
But she would soon learn that the stunt she was trying to pull off was trickier than she had realized.
As 2014 drew to a close, Fiorina began to make noise about a presidential bid, launching a miniature media tour in which she did not shy away from her role as the GOP’s woman truth teller; she took on the Left’s lame lady pandering and the partisan sexism of the mainstream media. One early example of her talent for Palinian posturing came when she appeared on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, a political gabfest known for its signature irreverence. Fiorina was the sole woman on a roundtable that otherwise featured Jay Leno, Democratic pundit Paul Begala, and author Salman Rushdie joking with the host about Kim Kardashian’s backside and Jeb Bush’s mother before devolving into fits of laughter at their own cleverness. Fiorina’s breaking point—and opportunity—came when Rushdie began discussing the liberal “fantasy” that Hillary Clinton would tap Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren as her 2016 running mate, creating an all-woman Democratic ticket.
“What happens in your fantasy?” Maher quipped to Rushdie, drawing naughty laughter from the men around the table.
“You know, how do I put this?” Rushdie responded. “They’re a little old for me.”
“Oh no you didn’t!” Maher responded, waving an index in a show of mock sassiness.
Fiorina finally interjected, “It’s pretty clear I’m the only conservative and the only woman on this panel, based on that last set of comments.”
The in-studio audience suddenly went silent as liberal guilt seemed to wash over them, and the dude-studded panel froze for an agonizingly awkward beat of silence. Fiorina felt like pumping her fist.
Take that.
She seized the moment again during an appearance on Bloomberg TV the night before the State of the Union. Mark Halperin, the cohost, was pressing Fiorina to name “two or three Republican women who are qualified to be president.” She tried responding by road testing a stump-bound spiel about the need for a return to citizen government, but Halperin wouldn’t back down. Finally, Fiorina saw her opportunity, and she pounced.
“Let me just ask you, Mark,” she said. “Would you ask the question, how many men are qualified to be president? I don’t think so.”
Halperin tried a halfhearted comeback, but the trump card had been played and the game was lost. His cohost, John Heilemann, quickly swooped in and changed the subject, while offstage, a female producer cheered on the feisty line to a Fiorina aide. “I’m so glad she called Mark on that,” she said. “He never asks questions like that about men.”
The next morning, Fiorina was at it again, this time appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The night before, President Obama had plugged in an applause line calling for legislation that would ensure equal pay for men and women—one that prompted a standing ovation from the chamber’s Democrats and statue-like silence from Republicans—and now senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett was on TV spinning for the proposal. While the MSNBC panelists took turns lobbing softballs at Jarrett, Fiorina waved at cohost Mika Brzezinski off camera and asked for a chance to get in a question.
When the camera turned to her, Fiorina told Jarrett, “I am struck by the fact that the president hasn’t really led in this regard. He’s not paying women equally by his own measures in his own White House… Why wouldn’t the White House take on the seniority system and say, ‘Let’s pay women by merit and their results’?” The clip of Fiorina puncturing Jarrett’s spin spread rapidly on the right, popping up on conservative sites like Breitbart.
But even as Fiorina’s made-for-cable performances surrounded her with that ever elusive “buzz”—and helped her stake a claim on her niche in the media—they also made her political team slightly nervous. True, making liberal bogeymen like Maher squirm with accusations of sexism was a slam dunk in conservative circles, and calling out the stewards of the always villainous mainstream media like Halperin would make her look tough on the right. But Fiorina’s strategists also knew she had to be careful. Pull one too many of these stunts, and their candidate could transform in an instant in the eyes of conservatives from the tough, truth-telling Amazon of the Right to the shrill, bossy PC police—a Hillary clone with an R next to her name.
Such was the double bind for the ambitious conservative woman in the post-Palin era. In a male-dominated movement, her gender was what made her unique and gave her a chance to break out—precisely with the sort of rhetoric reffing of the Left that Fiorina had been practicing. But if she allowed herself to become defined by her womanhood, she risked marginalization within the party. Conservative elites would dismiss her as a lightweight token, only interested in populist drumbeating and political celebrity—not issues or ideas. What’s more, if she kept up the girl-power talk for too long, she risked accidentally crossing the line from Sarah Palin to Sandra Fluke. For example, as much as Republicans thrilled at watching Fiorina make Jarrett squirm, those who took a moment to more closely study the exchange might have found her buying into a premise that was anathema to their idea of fairness. She was free to call Obama a hypocrite, but acknowledging that there are real, systemic biases behind pay inequity was a much riskier proposition. They told her to be careful.
“We can’t be the campaign that’s always calling balls and strikes,” one Fiorina adviser told me.
Fiorina’s embrace of Palinian gender politics positioned her as a rising star in the conservative movement as she headed toward 2016. But it also installed a ceiling—entirely visible, not made of glass—that kept her from rising too far, and that no Republican woman before her had figured out how to break through.
Chapter Seventeen
From Teacher’s Pet to Troll
Bobby Jindal, striving for a breakthrough of his own, looked out over the sea of seersuckers that had convened in Columbia for the annual Silver Elephant Dinner on June 6, 2014. He knew what he had to do. The field of likely GOP presidential candidates was ballooning. Beltway pundits were floating new prospects every day, and would-be contenders were coming out of the woodwork. (Carly Fiorina? Really?) To stay relevant, Jindal needed to seize every chance he got to make a splash—and here at the South Carolina Republican Party’s biggest fund-raiser of the year, the pressure was on.
Jindal had forty-five minutes to earn his keep as the event’s headliner, and he did not intend to waste it on caveats or carefully worded hedging. This wasn’t the venue to try out some new stuff he had been working on in the studio; it was an audience of liquored-up donors looking to have a good time on a Friday night, and they wanted to clap along to the greatest hits.
Jindal was happy to oblige.
He started the set with a catchy single: “I think President Obama should sue Harvard Law School to get his tuition back. I’m not sure what he learned!”
Laughter.
Then, an oldie but a goodie: “You may remember that this is a president who, when he was campaigning in California, accused the country of clinging to our guns and rel
igion.” Pause, smirk. “Now, I know that was supposed to be an insult, but as the governor of Louisiana, I’m proud to report to you that we’ve got plenty of guns and religion!”
Hoots, hollers.
Finally, an anthem of outrage that was burning up the charts just this week, as news broke that the Obama administration had given up five Taliban prisoners in exchange for the release of a disillusioned U.S. soldier named Bowe Bergdahl: “Apparently, our president has adopted a catch-and-release policy toward terrorists.” Then, inviting the audience to sing along with the chorus: “I’ve got three simple questions for you.
“Do you think it makes sense for the president of the United States to be negotiating with terrorists?”
No! came the response from the veterans and military moms looking up from their plates.
“Do you think it makes sense for the president of the United States to have the unilateral right to simply break and ignore American law whenever he chooses?”
No! bellowed the portly job creators and women in pearls.
“Do you think it makes sense for the president of the United States to release five Taliban members who may make it their lives’ mission to attack not only Americans but our way of life, our values, what we believe in—does it make sense for the president of the United States to let these terrorists go?”
No! yelled the freedom-loving South Carolinians who would soon leave this ballroom and tell their friends and neighbors to keep an eye out for that Jindal fella because he sure seems to know what he’s talking about.
By the end of the performance, the audience was on their feet, showering Jindal with validation. This new rhetorical approach of his—less bookish, nerdy, and earnest; more noisy, caustic, and sharply partisan—was a welcome transformation.
Twenty-two years earlier, Bobby Jindal—the stick-skinny Indian American kid sporting an oversize suit and a part in the middle of his hair—stood at the head of an august lecture hall on Oxford’s centuries-old campus and started to talk. He had a forceful, high-velocity style of speaking that caused consonants to bang into each other, frequently damaging the words beyond recognition. But it wasn’t long before the students in the audience realized what their classmate was up to: Bobby Jindal, all of twenty-two years old and a recently enrolled Rhodes scholar, was telling the world famous political theorist seated in the front row that he was wrong about everything.
At the start of the semester, Jindal had been the first to raise his hand when the professor, Ronald Dworkin, asked for volunteers to give class presentations. It wasn’t until Jindal went to the library after class that he discovered Dworkin was one of the most influential legal philosophers of his generation. Jindal spent hours perched at a quiet desk surrounded by towering bookshelves as he pored over Dworkin’s work. The more he read, the more he found to disagree with. The theory for which his professor was most famous contended that human rights were guaranteed by a “seamless web” of legal principles and precedent, that every question had one “right answer” that could be determined by examining the constellation of contracts that man has created over the centuries. Jindal thought that Dworkin was giving credit for the moral framework that governed humanity to a bunch of judges, scholars, and lawmakers, rather than acknowledging the fact that morality was absolute, objective, and God-given.
Deciding to say so in front of his entire class was more than a routine flourish of grad student bravado. Jindal had little academic training in political philosophy, having spent his undergraduate years at Brown diagramming prokaryotic cells and studying regulatory models for health insurance subsidies. But his personal study of Catholicism had led him to read legions of theologians and conservative philosophers, and he had built for himself a uniquely well-informed, scholarly orthodoxy. Inasmuch as he experienced ideas that challenged his worldview, it was typically through the eyes of Aquinas and Hayek, or in feisty dorm room debates in which the only goal was to win. It was in this spirit that Jindal set about outlining his arguments against Dworkin’s philosophy, using health-care policy as his frame because he was familiar with the material.
When the day of the presentation arrived, Jindal stood before the class and vigorously made his case. His central thesis was that a righteous health-care system could succeed only if it was based on the religious principle of “human dignity,” and would fail if it relied solely on the “neutral” liberal values outlined by Dworkin.
Jindal held forth for the better part of an hour, delineating the myriad ways in which Dworkin’s thinking was misguided. It wasn’t until he concluded his presentation and saw that his classmates were sitting in stunned silence that he realized he may have committed a faux pas. For several excruciating moments, nobody made a sound. “You could hear a pin drop,” he later recalled.
Finally, Dworkin dismissed the class, but before Jindal could slip away, the professor pulled him aside. Jindal braced himself for a reprimand. Instead, Dworkin asked if he would join him for lunch. He had been impressed by his student’s arguments—and his intellectual guts—and he wanted to talk about recruiting him to assist with research for his next book.
A couple of decades later, in Leadership and Crisis, Jindal would cheerfully gloss over what happened next. “It turned out [Dworkin] was writing a book on health care and asked me to help him,” he wrote. “It was a great learning experience, and while we never managed to agree on the issue, it was a wonderful opportunity to debate important ideas and policies, policies I’m still dealing with today.”
But Jindal’s relationship with the professor had a far more profound impact on the way he thought—and his approach to public policy—than he was willing to let on in a political memoir. Dworkin, a rakish, bespectacled superstar of the academy well-known for his wit and verve, took an interest in Jindal after his audacious class presentation, and the young student was soon pulled with unbending gravitational force into his orbit.
The project for which Dworkin enlisted Jindal’s help was not so much “a book on health care” as it was an enormously controversial and ambitious attempt by the liberal icon to reframe the charged public debate over abortion and euthanasia. Jindal spent months engaged in heady meetings at the professor’s office, providing research and talking through everything from American health policy to the Catholic catechism. Under Dworkin’s tutelage, Jindal was cast into a deep and vast sea of ideas that he had previously experienced only as he sliced through them in the high-powered vessel of orthodoxy.
The eventual result of Jindal’s research was Life’s Dominion, published in 1993, in which Dworkin argues that the pro-life and pro-choice camps are not actually ideological enemies, and that a proper examination of their positions reveals that they share the same values, both viewing human life as an “intrinsic” good. To get there, Dworkin reaches a number of conclusions that would rile any group of Christian conservatives, including a rather patronizing premise that, no matter what pro-life advocates might say, they can’t possibly believe that a fetus is a human being with the same “right to life” as a born child because many of them still support abortion rights in cases of rape and incest. The book made a splash in the United States, earning rave reviews from the likes of Susan Sontag and Joan Didion and many heated takedowns from Christian intellectuals. The venerable conservative Catholic journal First Things skewered Life’s Dominion, listing among its many complaints that “the position of the Catholic Church… is so misrepresented by Dworkin as to be almost unrecognizable.” Had Jindal known his presidential aspirations might one day hinge on his popularity among Duck Dynasty viewers, he might have asked the professor to keep his name off the acknowledgments page.
Jindal never did come around to Dworkin’s philosophical worldview, but the professor’s fingerprints were left all over the master’s thesis he wrote before graduating. Titled “A Needs-Based Approach to Health Care,” the 187-page document—which would remain tucked away in Oxford’s library for decades, largely forgotten and unread, until I came across i
t—was laced with Dworkin’s terminology even as it argued from an opposing philosophical standpoint: while Dworkin believed that health-care resources should be allocated according to human rights derived from man-made law, Jindal argued that only a societal belief in “human dignity”—detached from the law, and probably born of the Creator—could drive a just health-care system.
More revealing than the specifics of the philosophical debate, though, was the sophistication on display in Jindal’s discussion of justice and equality—a depth he had achieved, in large part, while studying under Dworkin. Indeed, Jindal had come a long way since reciting Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” speech as a high school conservative.
All cohorts benefit from the contributions of past generations and create a wealth of resources and ideas which benefit future generations… However, each individual is not in an immediately reciprocal relationship with society. The argument that each individual must receive benefits from society equal to his contributions contradicts the policy suggested here and the underlying principles…
Though rationing is necessary to control overall expenditures, human dignity invests individuals with inviolable rights which cannot be trumped by such considerations… Regardless of economic contributions, all humans have a right to adequate housing, food, clothing, and health care.
As a devout Catholic, Jindal’s arguments for a robust social safety net are not entirely surprising, but this rhetoric would likely sound alarm bells among the right wing he found himself courting ahead of 2016. Even more striking, in the final pages of his thesis Jindal outlined some proposed health-care policies he believed would help guarantee a more just system.
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