Classy as ever, Democratic Party

[unixronin]

And yes, I mean that sarcastically.

http://carlyfailorina.com/ (paid for by the California Democratic Party).  What more is there to say?

Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Carly Fiorina, who to all practical purposes single-handedly destroyed Hewlett-Packard (with only minimal assistance from her interim predecessor Richard Hackborn, whom you've probably never heard of).  But this is a new low in pettiness in politics.  What's the next step?  Will the parties start publicly calling each other's candidates poopyheads?  Will the candidates themselves start flicking boogers at their opponents in televised debates?

Dear Democratic and Republican Parties:

Please to hurry up and finish self-destructing, so that the rest of us can pick up the pieces and get on with America.  KTHXBAI.

Comments

[ithildae]

Carly Fiorina was an abysmal failure at HP because she was completely tone deaf to the existing culture, and she lacked the force of personality to drive a new culture into HP. (Please note: I really liked the culture that HP started with, the one that made it a global company.) Hardly an asset in politics.

American politics have been this low since the 1780's. The midget presidents of the mid 1800's inspired some very juvenile political cartoons. (They would not be allowed in a public school classroom today.) American attack adds have a history of being crude, vulgar, profane, sophomoric, racist and in other ways offensive. The web just makes all of that available to all of us. There is a story of Andrew Johnson spitting his chew into a senator's hat just before handing it back to him after a government function. (There is a reason he was impeached.) I don't know if such lowball tactics are common in other countries, history is not a strong interest, and there is too much to know.

[ithildae]

She was just trying to chase cost savings. The problem was, she wanted to save costs by outsourcing engineering, at a company that only did engineering. I can see doing manufacturing elsewhere. I don't like it, but I can see it.

[unixronin]

It's the Harvard School of Business "All companies are interchangeable" problem. Harvard's MBA program has, I think, done more damage to American business than anything else I can think of.

[ithildae]

I think the phrase is reducto absurdum or some such. (I never took latin.) It started with some useful ideas, and then drove them off the edge of a cliff. We are just now hitting bottom. It is kind of like juggling chainsaws, when you miss one, that is only the start of your problems.

[unixronin]

Carly Fiorina was an abysmal failure at HP because she was completely tone deaf to the existing culture, and she lacked the force of personality to drive a new culture into HP.

And don't forget the part where she thought it would be a really good idea to turn an innovative tech company that had built a justly-deserved reputation over the course of forty years into a remarketing company that did nothing but slap its own brand on lowest-bid Taiwanese-manufactured hardware and try to subsist somehow on the margins in an industry where those margins are already razor-thin.

(Blast it, my Greasemonkey fix-the-quote-button script isn't working on Dreamwidth. Who on earth at LiveJournal thought it was a good idea in the first place to have the button generate different quote markup depending on what you selected to quote? Perhaps I can talk Dreamwidth into a proper fix...)