Carly Fiorina: The Anti-Woman Woman Ted Cruz Doesn’t Need
On Tuesday, Donald Trump swept all five Republican presidential primaries. The next day, Ted Cruz, who now cannot enter the Republican National Convention as a first-ballot winner without somehow impossibly winning 104 percent of the remaining primary delegates, named Carly Fiorina as his running mate.
There’s an indispensable Simpsons moment where Homer’s brain says, “That’s it, I’m gettin’ outta here,” before you hear the sounds of footsteps and a door slamming. That moment might as well be now.
Sometime next year we’ll all have to figure out when the moment happened to each of us, probably to some more profound organ. Call it a soul, the spirit, a lingering faith that something meaningful is happening. We will all have to pinpoint the moment each of us broke. It doesn’t even have to be a serious or grand moment. It can be stupid. It just has to be enough.
Cruz and Fiorina are enough. My God, are they ever enough. A bumper crop, mother lode and doorbuster clearance of it. They are such a surfeit of enough that it’s practically homeopathy: one molecule of themselves diluted endlessly amongst the world’s tides would fix us all for good.
You can see why Cruz’s picking Fiorina happened, if you need to view these things through the kaleidoscope of election sense. Ted Cruz knew Wednesday’s news cycle would feature wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump handing him his ass in a box stamped RETURN TO HOUSTON. He knew Trump’s closing press conference comments about Hillary Clinton and his history of misogyny are a relevant electoral liability. And he knew Carly Fiorina is a woman and not busy doing anything else right now.
This is Cruz’s argument: Forget that I’m losing and pay attention to how — with the help of Carly Fiorina, noted woman — I wouldn’t lose a general election the same way Donald Trump will.
There’s no doubt that Cruz and Fiorina will get along just as well on the ticket as they have for the past several weeks. For one thing, they are two spectacular failed approximations of human beings, a man-and-woman pair with more rigid affect and two-dimensional representation of what people are like than the plaque NASA slapped on the sides of Pioneer 10 and 11.