Lover of Aquinas. Slayer of demon sheep.
Lover of Aquinas. Slayer of demon sheep. Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock

According to The Wall Street Journal, on May 4th, Carly Fiorina plans to join the practically thirteen million Republicans who are vying for the party’s presidential nom. Though she’s only favored, as the WSJ claims, by 2 percent of Republicans, her bigger issue is that she doesn’t seem to project that special mix of bafoonery, aloofishness, and baseless confidence necessary to garner a spot at the top of the GOP ticket.

In recent interviews, Fiorina shows herself to be far too nimble and coherent of a speaker to lead a party famous for its grunting, unqualified assertions of exceptionalism. Watch her respond somewhat substantively (if not a little elusively) to a commenter on MSNBC who basically calls her a loser for being fired as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

Not exactly destroyed:

Sure, she leans on some Republican talking points, but once they really get going she parries the Morning Joe anchors quite effectively. And if you have time to watch the full clip, you’ll find that she claims she could have used her position on the board to vote for herself and thus save her job at HP, but she didn’t.

She projects an air of genuine curiosity and intelligence on the stump, too. I mean, she ended her speech at this year’s New Hampshire Republican Leadership Summit with an astute analysis of the visual rhetoric at play in the statues of lady liberty and lady justice, figures which she claims are as important as the founding fathers. Plus, she worked in a pretty sick burn on Bill Clinton in reply to a Facebook commenter’s suggestion that judgement-clouding hormones rendered women unfit for the presidency: “Not that we have seen a man’s judgment clouded by hormones, including in the Oval Office.”

I don’t want to overstate my case here. Florina, after all, is partially responsible for this must-see demon sheep ad, which is so good I will risk slow load times to embed it here:

It’s ok. You can watch that again. You’ve got time. You deserve it.

But Fiorina is an interesting case in the undifferentiated blob of male marshmallow fluff currently making presidential bids. On the one hand, she’s a Stanford grad with a degree in medieval history and philosophy (!) and she holds slightly humorous views on reality TV. As a woman in the tech industry she started from the bottom of the HP corporate ladder and climbed all the way up to the corner office. She also says things like, “What we have now is less and less free market, and more and more crony capitalism.”

On the other hand, the board at HP fired her for mishandling their merger with Compaq, she lost to Barbra Boxer in the 2010 the senate race in California, and she also served as the economic advisor to McCain’s failed presidential campaign. Plus, she’s a former CEO running during a time of insanely high income inequality, which are associations from which Republicans may want to distance themselves.

Republican President? Probably not. But a VP candidate who could dampen Hillary Clinton’s “First Woman President” image and help rake in even more funding from Wall Street? Absolutely.

Well, you know, so long as she manages to escape the fiery eyes and the blunt, grass-gnashing molars of the dreaded demon sheep.