The Carly Bloggers

I know there are some conservative bloggers supporting Carly Fiorina, which is unusual out here. Daniel Blatt at Gay Patriot is one of them.

 He's also a part of why I decided to stay neutral. Frankly, speaking strictly as a conservative, and having been on calls with them both, I personally liked Chuck DeVore a little more than Carly in that one regard. At the same time, I've known and respected Dan both as a blogger and a conservative for years. His conservative cred has always been pretty strong with me, having seen various political positions he's held over time.

He lives in California. It isn't that I'm allowing him to make a decision for me, I didn't decide to back Carly, after all. It just seemed a stretch for me to tell Dan who his Senator should or shouldn't be.

To be fair, I should add this. I believe Dan feels DeVore isn't electable state-wide in California. After spending a good deal of time talking with Chuck one on one, I didn't come away feeling that way. He struck me as polished, professional and savvy enough to not get caught in that false "too conservative" trap. And they are both Pro-Life, which tends to be a conservative's stumbling block, more than anything else.

In short, I decided to state my opinions as candidly as I could and let two seemingly qualified people fight it out. In any event, for a gay dude, Dan tends to play it pretty straight as a blogger! lol Unlike the rather twisted Andy Sullivan, I'd add.

So, he takes exception to some of DeVore's attacks, yet admits Carly supported Prop 8. Some of Chucks's attacks have struck me as somewhat wide of the mark. However, at the same time, Carly turned around a DeVore attack over Internet regulation to take a jab at Chuck for not being interested in protecting women and children on line from predators. That's politics, folks!

As with Dan, the Prop 8 support bothers me. Yet, I don't see Carly being as liberal as some critics are suggesting. So, what's the truth of it? I don't know. Not living there, being an illegal immigrant or an ACORN worker, I'm not qualified to vote in California. So, I'm content to watch the race play out. That isn't the case in every state. But California seems like a foreign country to me at times, as much as it does anything else. Give Dan's post a look and make your mind up for yourself eventually, assuming you feel obliged to do so.

Comments

[PA]

Well...it was under Fiorina's tenure at HP that I stopped buying HP products because the quality of hardware and software took a very sharp decline. She transformed HP from a purveyor of high quality stuff worth paying a premium for into a purveyor of the decidedly mediocre worth picking up only if you can find it for free sitting on the curb on garbage day.

[Ad rem]

Hey, I live in California and it seems like a foreign country to me too!

[Evil Red Scandi]

I've followed Carly's career at HP closely and she really did a craptastic job. She completely changed their focus from "invent" to clone / copy. There has been some initial quality decline, but the real impact still hasn't hit yet. One major issue is that a few years ago they stopped innovating in the server market space (an area that was serving up some decent margins). These days they make some decent, but more or less undifferentiated products. A little bit better than Dell, and about equal to IBM. Cisco recently decided to jump into the market and came out with a product line that badly spanks the old guard. Pre-Carly, this is something HP would have been all over and out in front of. Instead, they've just had to make a multi-billion dollar acquisition that brings them from five years behind Cisco to about three and a half years behind (assuming Cisco just sits on their lead). Really pathetic, and it's going to make a dent in their bottom line for calendar 2010 through at least 2012 (if they're good *and* lucky).

More analysis here for the technically inclined: http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/11/13/hp-buys-3com-validates-cisco/

[Yehudit]

So Carly wants to protect herself from the internet?
/confused

[M. Simon]

The divide in this country is between city politics and rural politics. The first party to figure out how to square that circle will clear the table. The answer is libertarian for Republicans. Get out of the Culture War business.