Carly Fiorina for Veep?

She won’t be president. But the Weekly Standard makes the case for taking her seriously:

It’s an understatement to say that Fiorina has a difficult path to the White House. She’s never held public office, and her only political experience is losing the California Senate race in 2010 to Barbara Boxer. Real Clear Politics includes 12 current or likely GOP candidates on its average of primary polls, and Fiorina’s not one of them. That’s because most polling outfits don’t even ask about her. A Quinnipiac survey in late April found her support among primary voters at 1 percent, the same as two-term Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal—and the generic “someone else.” More than one Washington journalist I’ve talked with dismissed her candidacy before I could finish saying her name.

But there’s something intriguing about Candidate Fiorina. She’s a veteran of big business who rails against crony capitalism. She’s a modern, independent woman who’s unabashedly pro-life. Carly, as everyone knows her, is less Sarah Palin and more Ronald Reagan, a natural storyteller with a quick wit and an ear for emotional narratives. “I fully expect I’ll be underestimated. I have been all my life,” she says in an interview. “What I need to do is perform.”

One way she can perform is as the anti-Hillary!, as a woman of accomplishment instead of an advantageous marriage:

“What Hillary Clinton desperately wants to talk about is that she gets to be the first woman president. What she desperately wants to talk about is there’s a war on women. What she desperately wants to talk about is playing the gender card,” Fiorina continues. “If I am standing next to her on a general election debate stage, she can’t talk about any of those things. You know what she’s going to have to talk about? Her track record.”

The piece points out that Fiorina has many critics of her stormy tenure as head of Hewlett-Packard, which ended in her firing.

Despite her ugly exit from HP, Fiorina’s time there figures large in her campaign pitch. She reminds crowds that as the leader of a multinational corporation, she’s met with dozens of foreign leaders. “I’ve sat across the table from Vladimir Putin,” Fiorina often says. Heading a large company attuned her to the inherent problems of large systems. “Virtually everything I spent my time on was ‘How do we bust up this bureaucracy?’ ” Fiorina says of her CEO days. That sounds like a presidential campaign theme.

“This is a government that has become so big, so powerful, so costly, so complex, so corrupt, it no longer serves the people,” she says. “It is the weight of government, the power of government, the complexity of government that literally now is crushing the potential of this nation.” A Fiorina administration, she promises, would “reimagine government” for the purpose of “unlocking potential” in the American people.

All sounds good. A Fiorina candidacy, however, is really predicted upon a Hillary! candidacy — and that is just not going to happen.