In what can only be described as a last ditch effort to stop Donald Trump from securing the Republican nomination, Texas senator Ted Cruz announced former presidential candidate and Hewlett-Packard executive Carly Fiorina as his vice president pick.
“I will run on a ticket with my vice presidential candidate, Carly Fiorina,” he announced to prolonged applause from the Indianapolis crowd. “Cara Carleton Fiorina, known throughout the country simply by the name of Carly, is an extraordinary leader. Carly is brilliant and capable and yet she experienced the hard scrabble world of being a woman professional in a business world that extracts a price.”
“Any responsible candidate for president would have spent much time assessing possible candidates, thinking through the pros and cons, studying who these people are,” he said, one of many indirect references to Trump’s mostly-improvised campaign.
Cruz said that Donald Trump wouldn’t know what to do “when a strong powerful woman stands up and says ‘I am not afraid.'”
“This is a fight worth having, this is a fight worth winning, and with your help, we will win this fight,” Fiorina said. “Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, they are two sides of the same coin.”
“They are not going to challenge the system, they are the system.”
During her candidacy, Fiorina was vociferous in her opposition to abortion and often cited manipulated, misleading footage of interviews with Planned Parenthood executives as evidence of the organization’s supposed criminal actions.
“The vast majority of Americans agree, what Planned Parenthood is doing is wrong,” she said during an interview Fox News in November 2015. “That’s why the vast majority of Americans are prepared not only to defund Planned Parenthood, but also to stop abortion for any reason at all after five months.”
Fiorina ended her campaign in February after placing seventh in both the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries. At one point, she briefly rose in the polls, commanding 6 percent likely voters at her height. Her minor political celebrity is unlikely to help Cruz’s campaign in a general election against Hillary Clinton, further reinforcing the notion that the announcement could be little more than a dying gasp for the Texas senator’s presidential ambitions.
Photo: Former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina endorses Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz at a campaign rally in Miami, Florida March 9, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
