Ted Cruz supporters are seizing on comments made by Carly Fiorina at the time of the 2013 government shutdown to try to paint her as a tool of the party establishment. Jake Tapper quoted her as saying:
“There’s no honor in charging a hill that you know you can’t take, only casualties, although Ted Cruz maybe got name recognition and money along the way,” said Fiorina. “But President Obama wanted this shutdown. And Ted Cruz played right into his hands.”
While Cruz himself has been silent on Fiorina’s remarks, his own recent comments on the Senate floor, where he took Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to task over both an Obamacare vote and a vote to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank show that he maintains that leading the shutdown was the right thing to do. Since it was his signature moment – much as Rand Paul’s filibuster to save us from the imminent threat of drone warfare on Main Street was his – it’s hard to see where he has any other choice.
He and they may think that, but ultimately, this was and remains a fight over tactics, not goals. With the exception of Jeb Bush, I can’t think of another Republican candidate who doesn’t want to repeal Obamacare outright, and even Bush’s hedging is usually on the way to a discussion about what to do next, instead of leaving things as they were. Cruz led the shutdown effort which was a polling disaster for Republicans, and could well have led to failing to take the Senate yet again, had the Obamacare and healthcare.gov rollouts not be such a train wreck themselves.
In my mind, while losing the fight was demoralizing, the shutdown tactic more or less resembled the famous Sidney Harris cartoon. There was a start, and an end, but step 2 was always more than a little fuzzy; there was no chance that then-Majority Leader Reid was going to pass a bill on to the White House defunding Obama’s signature domestic legislation. For Fiorina to say at the time that the shutdown played to Obama’s favor was to say no more than many others were saying at the time. Revisiting what was a fight over strategy and trying to cast it as a willingness to accept the status quo may be clever – Fiorina will have to come up with a strong response to avoid looking defensive. But I’m not sure that it’s good for the party.
For me, Cruz would earn a lot of points by at least realizing that the strategy was doomed, that it did indeed fail, and that the cry of, “It would have worked if only everyone had followed me,” fails to take into account reasons that Republicans might not have followed him. Instead, I’d like to see him discuss why it failed, and what he learned from the experience.
Fiorina has a “What I learned from my failure” story of her own to tell from her signature career moment, and likewise, so far has been reluctant to tell it. Fiorina’s tenure at HP was controversial, but appears to have been on the whole successful. Nevertheless, she was fired by the board in what she describes as a “boardroom brawl,” where the knives came out after many years of making enemies at the company.
Fiorina’s strength thus far has been the ability to take negative questions and turn them on their heads, a skill that would be priceless in confronting Madame Hillary and her media minions in the general election campaign. She’s tried to spin that as a result of making hard decisions, and no doubt that’s true.
But it’s only half the story. Success usually breeds loyalty, not hostility. And if her failure was one not of business but of politics, well, she’s running for president, not CEO. She would also do well to discuss what went wrong, what she learned from the experience that would serve her in this most political of jobs.
