Her Nose Should Have Grown Longer by This Morning
Her answer on
Russia, for instance, was bizarre.
The Sixth Fleet
is already huge, and it's hard to say why adding to its capabilities would
intimidate Putin — after all, America has enough nuclear weapons pointed at
Russia to level the country thousands of times over. Her proposal for more
military exercises in the Baltics seemed odd in light of the fact that
President Obama is already
conducting military exercises in the Baltics. And the US already
has around 40,000 troops stationed in Germany, so it's hard to
say what good "a few thousand" more would do. And pushing on a
missile defense system in Poland is a very long-term solution to a very current
problem. In total, Fiorina's laundry list of proposals sure sounded like a
plan, but on inspection, it's hard to see why any of them would convince Putin
to change course.
Her immigration
answer was also odd to anyone who knew the issue's recent history. It's true
Obama didn't immediately push immigration reform when he took office, but it
was his top priority after reelection, and he spent a solid year trying to make
the Senate's comprehensive immigration-reform bill — the one crafted, in part,
by Sen. Marco Rubio—
into law. That legislation was stopped by Republicans in the House of
Representatives, not by the Democrat in the White House. "Send me a
comprehensive immigration reform bill in the next few months," Obama begged in
2013, "and I will sign it right away."
Or take her
biggest applause line of the night: a riff on the Planned Parenthood tapes that
set conservative Twitter afire. "I dare Hillary Clinton,
Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the
table,it's heart beating, it's legs kicking while someone says
we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain."
The only
problem? Nothing like that happens in the Planned Parenthood tapes. As Sarah
Kliff, who has watched all the tapes, wrote,
"either Fiorina hasn't watched the Planned Parenthood videos or she is
knowingly misrepresenting the footage."
This has become
something of a habit for Fiorina, who has a notable facility for delivering
answers that thrill conservatives but fall apart under close examination. In a
recent interview with Katie Couric, for instance, Fiorina delivered a
four-minute riff on climate change that the National
Review enthused "shows how to address the left on climate
change." The only problem, as David Roberts pointed out, was that every single
thing she said in it was wrong.
But if
presidential campaigns were decided by fact checkers, Al Gore would have won in
a landslide. Fiorina is, for now, able to do what her competitors aren't:
command a stage, speak in specifics, project knowledge, and elicit roars from a
crowd. She's a political outsider in a campaign that favors outsiders, an
orthodox conservative at a moment when Republicans are terrified of Donald
Trump's heterodoxies, and a woman in a year when most Republicans think Hillary
Clinton's main advantage is her gender. And she's now won two debates against
the most talented Republican field in a generation.
Fiorina is
going to be a force to be reckoned with, even if it's going to leave fact
checkers and policy analysts pulling their hair out.
