Carly Fiorina Nails It: It’s Democrats, Not Republicans, That Most Americans See As ‘Extreme’

Carly Fiorina Nails It: It’s Democrats, Not Republicans, That Most Americans See As ‘Extreme’ | Mediaite

On Thursday, former Republican Senate candidate from California, Carly Fiorina, dropped an impressive bit of counterintuitive political wisdom on her fellow panel guests during CNN’s increasingly interesting, unscripted “unsolicited advice” segment with Pete Dominick. Fiorina performed a clever bit of reverse logic on Democrats and identified, succinctly and dispassionately, the many reasons why the Democratic National Convention has handed Republicans a litany of ways in which they can tar Democrats as the party of real extremism for America’s center-right electorate.

Fiorina set up the road-worn Democratic attack on Republicans as “extreme” – a charge born in the pages of the New York Times within hours of the birth of the tea party in April 2009, and clung to ever since by Democratic party operatives as tightly as one would imagine residents of Western Pennsylvania cling to scripture and firearms.

Since nearly the minute President Barack Obama was inaugurated, Democrats have charged that Republicans’ views are outside what they imagine to be the values shared by most Americans. To reinforce this view, they see empirical evidence that contradicts this notion as inexplicable aberrations — like, say, the largest electoral drubbing the Democratic party has been handed by a midterm electorate since 1938.

Fiorina was not one of the lucky ones in 2010, narrowly (for California) losing her Senate race to multi-term Sen. Barbara Boxer. But the clever former Hewlett-Packard CEO has wisdom to share with her party. She showed that political acumen in today’s “unsolicited advice” segment, when she detailed the many ways in which the Democratic party has shown itself to be utterly insular and dedicated to excluding all but the most reinforcing views about where Americans really stand on the issues.

“I’ve been shocked at the last two nights,” Fiorina began. “We’ve had audiences here booing when God was put back into the party platform.” Why would the electorate respond poorly to yesterday’s embarrassing episode? According to a Pew survey from 2007 of 35,000 adults, only 16 percent of Americans described themselves as unaffiliated with any church, and just 4 percent of those respondents were atheists or agnostics. Americans are, by and large, friendly to religion if not religious themselves.

“We have people who are clearly anti-free trade — something that Clinton was always very pro,” Fiorina continued. Mitt Romney has his own troubles on trade, adopting some troubling anti-Chinese rhetoric while on the trail during the GOP primary process. However, as a seasoned businessman who dealt with China their rising steel industry quickly drove the globe out of the steel business in the 1990s, it’s fair to say that he understands the consequences of a trade war with China.

Americans in general do not have a sour view of free trade across borders. In 2009, 66 percent of Americans supported free trade. That number slipped a bit in 2010 as the persistent recession turned into a sluggish recovery. A Pew poll from November 2010 showed a plurality of Americans had become suspicious of free trade. However, when broken down nation by nation, the only country Americans would be even slightly wary of entering into free trade agreements with was protectionist China – and then, only by a margin of 46/45 percent.