The contenders for the Republican presidential nomination began the campaign laying out plans to stop the rise of a formidable woman.
They might have been thinking of the wrong formidable woman.
Before Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush or any other Republican poll leader gets to take on the Democrats’ Hillary Clinton, he may have to hold off the GOP’s own Carly Fiorina.
For voters open to nominating someone without a political track record — and the polls say that’s most of them — Fiorina put on an attention-getting performance Wednesday night, producing the most moving moments in the Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.
The overarching question going into the 11-candidate main event of the debate double-header was who would be able to go toe-to-toe with Trump, the Republican front-runner whose popularity could no longer be expected to collapse on its own.
Jeb Bush was able to do it, sparring with Trump over the influence of money in politics. Chris Christie had a good night, standing up for the middle class as Trump and Fiorina compared their CEO careers, and Marco Rubio projected attractive seriousness — if only after opening with a weak California drought joke.
But it was Fiorina who jumped through the TV screen, as she had in the undercard debate last month in Cleveland that lifted her into the top 10 in recent polls and earned her a spot on the big stage this time.
In the highlight of the evening, the former Hewlett-Packard chief and 2010 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from California turned the tables and used Trump as her foil.
Asked by the CNN moderator about Trump’s derogatory remarks about her looks, Fiorina responded with dignity in an answer that ended: “I think women all over the country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.”
Trump replied, lamely, patronizingly: “I think she’s got a beautiful face, and she’s a beautiful woman.”
Fiorina had the sense to stay silent and let Trump’s words sink in.
This happened a few minutes after Fiorina combined thoughts about foreign policy and the Planned Parenthood abortion controversy into a brief stemwinder about “the character of the nation” that drew the Reagan Library audience’s loudest and most prolonged ovation of the night.
Trump was undisciplined and capricious. As everybody wondered who would take the first rhetorical poke at Trump, it was Trump who flicked the first insult — at Rand Paul, way down at the edge of the stage and in the polls.
Meanwhile, it becomes increasingly difficult to picture Fiorina having a bad, flustered, erratic public moment.
Fiorina’s restrained way of poking Trump was to say that all candidates’ character “will be revealed over time and under pressure.”
Now it may be time for Fiorina’s own character, her specific proposals and her business record to be more closely scrutinized.
This campaign has shown how hard it is for analysts to know who had a good day or a bad day. For instance, every time Trump seems to put his foot in it, his poll numbers go up.
But while others such as political outsider Carson, Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. Scott Walker had trouble connecting Wednesday, Fiorina unquestionably had a good day. Whatever Trump thinks of her appearance, onstage she looked like a force to be reckoned with.
