Much has been and will be written about Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Even the Rodham that popped up after she was encased in the White House . . . the first time. A closer look at Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina gives us a tale of two women who have taken two entirely different paths in reaching their seventh decade.
You can like a career politician or not. But you can’t argue with the fact that experience counts. If experience didn’t count, you would let your 8 year old babysit. Hillary and Carly have two completely different resumes. One held one high profile job for six years until she was fired. She has been elected to nothing. The other held several high profile jobs. Then the people of New York State elected her twice.
The lesson here is, what do you want your resume to look like? Yes fresh perspective is important and not drinking the Kool-Aid can be important. Would you really want to get in a NASCAR with someone driving for the first time?
Carly Fiorina was CEO of HP FROM 1999-2005.
She was supposed to be the beacon for women everywhere. And she was not. She was supposed to be the beacon for business women everywhere. She was the only female CEO of a Fortune 20 company and she was supposed to break the glass ceiling. And she did not. She went to the political world and some thought she would be a beacon for old white guys in the Grand Ole Party, and she was not. It’s still pretty much an old white guy’s party.
Hillary was an attorney, she was First Lady, she was a senator and secretary of state. She was elected by the people twice. Carly Fiorina has been a “was not” at least since she was fired from HP in 2005. She was not elected when she ran for Senate in California. She was not effective as a media spokesperson for McCain, actually saying in an interview that Palin lacked the experience to run a major company like Hewlett-Packard. Under her tenure HP lost half of its value and the Board fired her. For this she is supposed to win political office like the presidency? I don’t get the resume.
So what we have is a woman CEO who failed as a CEO and tried the political arena.
She failed. She has held no elective office anywhere, anytime and now wants to run for president? Did she expect to just start as CEO when she was at HP? The American Public usually gets it right. They like their presidents to have had government experience at the national or state level. They would rather elect governors than senators, people with cabinet experience versus congressional experience.
When it comes to Congress they may tire of career politicians but when it comes to the executive branch, the American public appears to want their president experienced. In fact it was almost 50 years between elections when the American public elected someone directly from the Senate to the Oval Office. They did it in 1960 when they elected John Kennedy and they did it in 2008 when they elected Barack Obama. That’s 48 years in-between.
Only twice in history has a candidate won with no government experience and in those two cases they were both military generals after big wars. Hillary has the resume. You may agree with her or not, it is hard to argue her resume. Carly Fiorina has a resume. You may agree with her or not, it is hard to argue her resume. You have the opportunity to affect your resume. Your resume will be a tale of what?
Read more posts by Leslie Ungar here. Leslie blogs for JenningsWire.
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