SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Carly Fiorina, the embattled former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, has declared her second candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, pitting her against Democratic favorite Hillary Clinton. For one of the first times in U.S. history, voters will encounter a fresh dynamic in the battle for the White House between two viable women of stature and influence. Although misunderstood and much maligned for her countless business, social and political failures, Fiorina could emerge as one of the best chief executives for America today. In fact, she seems to understand the mindset, motivations and pulse of the public in a way that Clinton never will. Here are Fiorina’s positions on the issues and all the ways she could surpass Ronald Reagan as the country’s most beloved and effective Republican president.

Failing Up and Setting Examples Not to Follow to Inspire Progress

Carly Fiorina is a decisive, determined disrupter who clawed her way from secretarial work to become a titan of industry. And as the Titans of mythology, she overthrew an established body of primordial rulers like a lumbering, single-minded force of nature -- only to be ousted herself by a younger generation of more progressive, savvy, engaged and popular leaders. The problematic deities of Olympus eventually fell, too, ushering in an uninterrupted era of Christendom in the once pagan Roman Empire. Fiorina knows her history. And she recognizes that no utopias are created in a vacuum of idealism -- they instead spring from the deep well of measurable and memorable failure.

Hewlett-Packard is stronger today because of Fiorina’s bold efforts to send the enterprise crashing to the bottom so that it could learn to rise again. Without her disastrous decisions and rash actions, none of this progress could have been achieved. For example, HP’s profits climbed 30 percent over the past year as a result of the company learning from the lessons of her ruinous reign.

The U.S. economy remains unstable, and the tepid recovery has done little to avail most working Americans. Under Fiorina’s brown thumb, the diseased crops of the nation can finally wither away and die, paving the way for greener thumbs to enter and sow the seeds of success in 2020.

Small Government, For Real This Time

Every Republican politician has vowed to reduce the size of our onerous federal government, yet they all ironically increase the bulk of this leviathan in the process. Fiorina is a leader of substance, not rhetoric. Her actions are absolute and her resolve unshakable. Her business acumen and experience as the first woman to command and then gut a Fortune 20 enterprise means no more false claims -- no longer will a conservative hero promise to cut the head off the Hydra, just to see more heads spawn from those efforts. Fiorina doesn’t merely offer the assurance of downscaling federal agencies, her entire corporate strategy demonstrates that she can and will eviscerate the public sector across all departments and operational entities.

As the CEO of HP in the early part of the new century, Fiorina unceremoniously laid off close to 30,000 employees and shipped their jobs to China, India and even Russia. Meanwhile, she bought a million-dollar yacht and five corporate jets. Democratic rivals castigated those decisions, but conservative allies reminded the nation that Fiorina’s seemingly lavish and self-serving purchases were, in reality, altruistic.

What we have learned from every Republican administration after Eisenhower is that our financial strength depends on trickle-down economics, where the expenditures of the absurdly wealthy cascade down and into the pockets of the middle and lower classes. Thousands of workers and a multitude of specialized vendors -- each employing hundreds of workers themselves -- were required to build these vehicles. Had Fiorina not bought them, who knows how many American companies and laborers would have been deprived work, incomes or the profits necessary to create jobs?

But the fact remains that Fiorina did send some jobs overseas -- positions that most Americans complain about. According to the latest polls on the labor force, over 76 percent of working adults surveyed said their workplaces were “miserable.” Even more telling, about 65 percent of managers admitted unhappiness at work, too. On top of that, only 35 percent of the workers felt any real diversity existed in their organizations. This is where Fiorina’s “right-shoring,” not offshoring, resolves the issues. Not only is she eliminating work that people hate, she’s tasking that work to foreigners. Sweatshops are full of mixed ethnicities, genders, races and ages. And that brings a level of diversity still absent in most American business cultures.

Fiorina’s only regret in taking jobs away from 30,000 unhappy families was being too slow. As she told Fortune in 2005, the only wisdom she gained from running HP into the ground was that she should have moved more quickly in ejecting certain people. Wiser now, she says she “would have done them all faster. Every person that I’ve asked to leave, whether it’s been clear publicly or not, I would have done faster.”

This is tremendous news for conservatives who have yet to see a significant reduction in government. Fiorina already has plans to wipe out Congress, the Supreme Court and most regulatory agencies during her first week in office. She will right-shore those positions to educated and skilled counterparts in Asia and Eastern Europe who are hungrier than most Americans for opportunities, and who will work for a fraction of the pay. In turn, the nation will finally see a lean but functional federal body, full of diversity, driven advocates and at pay scales so ridiculously meager that taxes, budgets and the deficit will plummet within months.

Climate Change

This represents an issue in which Fiorina’s bipartisanship shines. She acknowledges that climate change is real and manmade, an attitude that appeases liberals. However, she also admits that it’s unstoppable and beyond the power of any single nation to correct. Therefore, attempting to ban industries from harnessing fossil fuels would have no beneficial effect in the face of our inevitable doom -- it merely cripples the economy for Earth’s final generation.

Education

Unlike Hillary Clinton, who is often portrayed as an imperious and distant intellectual, overly versed in civics and politics, Carly Fiorina fits into the world of the common American. Her undergraduate degree is in medieval history and philosophy. Her advanced degrees are in business. She dropped out of law school because the studies were abstruse and gave her “blinding headaches every day.” These are feelings average voters can relate to. They make her real -- imperious and distant, but familiar -- at least academically. Like most conservatives, she understands that focusing on learning is less crucial than competing with other countries through practical test scores.

Guns

Guns saved this nation from incursion. Banning private weapons weakens our defense -- undermining the nature of a well-armed militia. Fiorina is not a dainty, feminine leader who lets her emotions dictate her direction. The Constitution accords every citizen the unfettered right to bear firearms, so she wants no laws made that will limit that freedom in any way. Automatic weapons should be widely available to anyone in need. And even some felons should be allowed to carry guns.

Women

Carly Fiorina is one of the guys. She detests the liberal pandering of rivals such as Clinton, who believe a woman should have control of her own body. In this delicate issue, Fiorina clearly sides with her conservative male colleagues. Fiorina supports the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which bans abortions 20 weeks after fertilization. She has also publicly announced that she would vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade if the opportunity presented itself. A campaign aide said that Fiorina believes women who want the power to determine how their bodies and reproductive rights are decided should become transgender males.

Gays

When running for U.S. Senate in 2010, Carly Fiorina openly endorsed and backed California’s Proposition 8, which sought to make same-sex marriages unlawful in the state. More recently, she attacked detractors who protested Indiana’s religious freedom law as “destructive.” Granting rights to one group by stripping them from others is decidedly anti-American, she declared. Same-sex matrimony is an issue best decided by disgusted families, churches and voters -- not by self-important and self-appointed judges, such as representatives in government or the stewards of civil rights in the courts.

“I hope we are at the point now in this country where we can have a respectful conversation between people who have different views,” Fiorina told the National Journal. “Between people who believe marriage is a religious institution with a spiritual foundation and those abominations who believe in sodomy and destroying Christianity. I hope we can have a respectful conversation without the name calling and without criticizing the beliefs of millions of America’s faithful, who are constantly under fire and in danger of becoming the most discriminated class of individuals in this supposedly free country.”

As a business executive and Christian, Fiorina also preaches that if thine eye offends thee, pluck it out. In other words, people who believe they are being persecuted or exposed to hostile attitudes should remove themselves from those situations. Using the example of Tim Cook, she explained: “When Tim Cook is upset about all the places that he does business because of the way they treat gays and women, he needs to withdraw from 90% of the markets that he’s in, including China and Saudi Arabia.”

This statement is important on many levels. First, asking government to decide what rights a particular group of people has will increase the size and role of government -- something Fiorina’s intent on eliminating. It also takes power away from voters and their states, transferring that authority to an out-of-touch elite in the federal sphere. The solution is much simpler: instead of threatening bakeries, picketing Chick-fil-As or excoriating Christian pizzerias, members of the LGBT community should simply avoid bigoted areas and refuse to transact business in discriminatory establishments -- not complain or put themselves in positions to judge others without knowing anything about their lives.

She also warned about the negative impacts of revealing sexual orientation publicly, using the workplace as an example: “It’s simply disruptive and lowers morale. Take the case of Tim Cook. By welcoming gays and embracing a policy of openness, he’s just inviting a bunch of deviants into a professional environment, where they’ll probably spend their days watching iPad porn and masturbating in the halls. The company may have to change its name to Fapple.”

Sanity and Probable Winner by Forfeit

In Fiorina, the GOP has a female White House contender who doesn’t outwardly believe in witchcraft, Russians infiltrating her backyard or a coming apocalypse slated for late summer, as predicted by Michele Bachmann: “We have very little time, in my opinion, left before the second return of Christ. That’s good news.” Bachmann, incidentally, decided against campaigning in the 2016 race, citing the exciting news of the End Time and her hectic schedule, which is now dominated by Rapture preparations. And if the other religious zealots currently vying for the Republican ticket also ascend to their Caucasian, heterosexual, hate-filled Heaven, that leaves Fiorina as the most likely nominee.

2015. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See disclaimers.