I woke up this morning to a front page article in The New York Times all about how Carly Fiorina, the newly minted Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in California, dissed the incumbent Barbara Boxer’s hair in one of those “open mike” comments, the kind that percolate up when a candidate speaks without realizing the comments would be overheard. The press has jumped on this as a window into Fiorina’s character. Never comment on a woman’s hair, one pundit said. A stylist was quoted as saying that a woman’s hair is her personality. Maybe so. I am bald and a man so I just don’t know.
Now, I thought Fiorina did a terrible job at HP. It was five years of non-stop drama and she almost drove the company into the ground. To top it off, she is trying to claim credit for Mark Hurd’s subsequent success. That said, shouldn’t open-mike comments be out of bounds for reporters (although in a YouTube age they probably will always circulate to some degree.) Do we really learn anything from candidates’ off-hand remarks?
I am old enough to remember the ruckus Ronald Reagan raised when he tested a microphone by announcing that the bombing of the Soviet Union could begin. It turned out that Reagan was the least war-like of all our presidents in the last 30 years (though there were fewer military casualties in the Clinton administration).
Based on her tenure at HP, I think Fiorina is going to have a “character problem” because apparently a lot of people who have worked with her don’t like her and she seems to have gotten off on the wrong foot with the press as well. But should the voters of California choose their senator based on who has the best hair or what one candidate says about the way the other candidate looks?
Below are images of Carly Fiorina (before her bout with cancer and chemotherapy) and Barbara Boxer from 2007. So who has the best hair? As they say, “we report, you decide.”
Carly Fiorina before her chemotherapy
Barbara Boxer in 2007
Interesting point about the the whole “open mike” gaffe concept.
However, you need to consider that there are times when politicans use the “open mike” as an excuse to get something out in public by “accident.”
Two (unconfirmed) instances of this are George H.W. Bush’s remark that “I kicked a little ass” following the Vice Presidential debate in 1984.
The other example would be Bill Clinton’s tirad against Jessey Jackson during the 1992 race — no, on the Sister Soljah comment, but an ealier incident where he went off on Jackson when confronted by an erroneous report that Jackson had endorsed Tom Harkin. Again, that was another case of an “accident.”
The above examples prove nothing, of course, but if this is something that elected officals use to get things out in the press aren’t they fair game?
Beyond that, I think it is unavoidable that these things get dicussed in the press, and that is something that is only going to get worse now that we live in the YouTube era.