Donald Trump, prepare to meet Carly Fiorina.
Regardless of whether her strong performance in last week’s B-team debate gives her a jump in the polls, CNN will now find itself under extreme pressure to give the former Hewlett Packard CEO a prized, top-tier spot at the next gathering of GOP presidential candidates in September.
A confrontation between the only female Republican candidate in the 2016 field and the loose-lipped billionaire who is roiling the GOP elite isn’t just good politics. It’s great television – and that is what’s driving this current stage of the race for the White House.
We may someday look back at 60 minutes late Friday afternoon as a bewitching hour for the Republican presidential contest. Precisely 24 hours and 30 minutes after her Cleveland debut, Fiorina walked into a meet-and-greet in posh Brookhaven, an event that had quickly swelled to more than four times the original 50 guests expected.
“From 7 a.m. to 3 in the afternoon, I changed the room size three times. It’s a great problem to have. It was unreal,” said Joyce Stevens, a Republican with Atlanta roots and one of the organizers of the Fiorina reception.
“This is her breakout day,” said Jef Fincher, a Republican activist from Gwinnett County, while waiting for his new favorite candidate. He was passing out self-printed flyers filled with Facebook links and website addresses, the stuff of a modern grassroots campaign.
Liz Hausmann, vice chairman of the Fulton County Commission, was impressed by what Fiorina had shown on television the night before. “To me, she has a presence. She has clarity of thought. Professional women can really connect to her,” Hausman said.
So that was one scene. But even as Fiorina bathed in the first grassroots proof of her new-found celebrity, Donald Trump was on the phone, and on-air, with CNN’s Don Lemon. The pair discussed that hardball debate question that Fox News’ Megyn Kelly had posed to him – a perfectly appropriate query for an A-Team candidate: Is it proper for a presidential candidate to refer to women as “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.”
During Thursday’s debate, Trump laughed it off. In the Lemon interview, the GOP frontrunner called the question “off-base” and implied that Kelly’s line of inquiry was a result of menstruation: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever,” Trump told Lemon.
Within hours, the GOP frontrunner would be disinvited from the RedState Gathering in Atlanta by organizer and WSB Radio host Erick Erickson, an occasional paid analyst for Fox News.
But we’re getting ahead of our story. In her Brookhaven bubble, Fiorina knew none of this. And yet throughout the day, she had already been auditioning as Donald Trump’s new chief nemesis.
The former Hewlett Packard chief has often been overlooked in a 17-candidate field. She ran an unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate in her home state of California. Slack fundraising has been as much a vulnerability as is name ID. (A previous appearance in Atlanta, in February, was on a paralyzing snow day.)
Long before Thursday, Fiorina had told top Georgia Republicans that the 11 debates sanctioned by the Republican National Committee would be essential to her strategy. And at the first one, even at the “kid’s table,” Fiorina proved herself worthy of another look.
She showed herself conversant in foreign policy, a difficult topic for governors to master, never mind a candidate who has never held public office. “On Day One in the Oval Office, I would make two phone calls. The first one would be to my good friend, Bibi Netanyahu, to reassure him we will stand with the state of Israel,” she said. “The second will be to the supreme leader of Iran. He might not take my phone call, but he would get the message.”
She punched up at Trump, who would be on the prime-time debate panel later that evening. “Since he has changed his mind on amnesty, on health care and on abortion, I would just ask, ‘What are the principles by which he will govern?’”
And, as she has since she began her campaign, Fiorina argued that she was the best Republican to go face-to-face with the only other woman the 2016 contest.
“Hillary Clinton lies about Benghazi, she lies about emails, she is still defending Planned Parenthood and she is still her party’s frontrunner,” Fiorina said. “We need a nominee who is going to throw every punch – not pull punches.”
Fiorina said much the same thing on Friday at the RedState Gathering in Atlanta – from which Trump would be banned. Though, serendipitously, she threw in this additional line:
“I was asked by a national television show whether I thought a woman’s hormones prevented her from serving in the Oval Office,” Fiorina said. “My response was, ‘Gee, can anyone think of any instance in which a man’s judgment might have been clouded by his hormones?’”
She also advertised herself as every bit the business-oriented outsider as Donald Trump, after being asked how she would interact, if elected, with House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – both Republicans.
“We have a lot of people in Washington who have benefited from the status quo. And they’re the last people who are going to change it,” Fiorina said.
Much of this was repeated yet again hours later in Brookhaven, but there was more. “In your heart of hearts, you know you want to see me debate Hillary Clinton,” she told her audience.
But to debate Clinton, she must get past Trump. The Brookhaven crowd knew that, and asked when she would confront The Donald. “I don’t know. But let’s just say the next debate is Sept. 17 at the Reagan library in California,” Fiorina replied.
The California debate will be jointly produced by CNN and Salem Media Group. Republicans are torn. Some would like to see Trump dumped from the debate stage, despite fears that he would mount an independent campaign that could jeopardize GOP chances.
But this is unlikely to happen, and not just out of political calculations. The Fox News debate broke audience records in large part because of Trump’s presence. “They got 24 million [viewers] because I was in there,” Trump reminded Lemon.
But put Carly Fiorina next to him, and CNN might get 24 million more.
