The Carly Fiorina Hair Flap

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

June 11, 2010 | Journalism4u | Tags: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

The Tea Party Examined

The so-called Tea Party movement has certainly gotten a lot of media

Angry member of the Tea Party

An angry Tea Partier

attention since a year ago March.  Generally portrayed as angry–very angry–and not too bright–best demonstrated by the quote “keep the government’s hands off my Medicare”–the coverage has conjured  a lot of cultural assumptions.  Consequently, the results from a poll that The New York Times has been publishing over the past couple of days have been very interesting.  Not surprisingly, the Tea Party is largely male, white and older.  Since the days of Network’s Howard Beale, older white men have been on anger’s vanguard.  What is surprising is that Tea Party members are better educated and richer than expected. And what is very surprising is that many members of the Tea Party feel that personally they are doing just fine, thank you, although they think the country is going to hell in a handbasket, so to speak.  The contradiction between their anger at the direction of the country but their sense of personal well-being seems to me to point to a more inchoate sense of loss, which is probably hard to address politically.  As always, despite what the polls say now, the Tea Party movement’s real electoral strength won’t be tested until–okay this is kind of obvious–there is an election.  The results of the Times poll suggests that at least to some degree, the Tea Party are Ross Perot voters redux–only older, angier and even whiter.  And while the Perot movement generated a lot of heat, it did not change the direction of the country.

April 20, 2010 | Journalism4u | Tags: , , , | 3 Comments »