Possible Mccain Fiorina Ticket

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain stands while Carly Fiorina, former chairman and chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard, speaks during a campaign event in Warren, Michigan, January 12, 2008.

Image: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters/Landov

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"Step into my palatial office," says Carly Fiorina. She's kidding. The once-mighty C.E.O. of ­Hewlett-Packard, the one who was always being named the most powerful woman in business, now inhabits a dim, spartan office at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, a few blocks from the Capitol, with furniture that looks as though it came from the Nixon administration. "The hooks are nice," she jokes, pointing at the ones protruding from the bare walls.

Some three and a half years after she was ousted from H.P., Fiorina has a new title that's grand, even if her office is not. She's the victory chair of the Republican National Committee, nomenclature that looks good on the TV screen. Basically it means she's a roving ambassador for the G.O.P. and John McCain's presidential campaign. She's not a major player in fundraising or strategy, but her unpaid job has made her one of the most visible faces of the Republican Party this election year. She appears on TV about six times a week (you may have seen her on everything from ABC's This Week to Fox Business Network, where she was a contributor until the R.N.C. gig started in March, forcing her to resign) and grants interviews all over cyberspace, to everyone from HispanicBusiness.com to Gristmill, an environmental blog. She's not a close McCain buddy like, say, Republican South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, but she traveled with the presidential candidate on his poverty tour earlier this year and has been by his side at numerous press conferences. She's also advising McCain on tech and economic issues (though clearly that's a secondary role) and she's even been mentioned as a possible running mate—talk she discourages but doesn't dismiss, even if the chances of it actually happening are probably far-fetched. Still, there's no doubt that if McCain wins, she's going to have a big job.

It's all part of the comeback Fiorina has been trying to orchestrate since she was pushed out of H.P. After her tumultuous tenure, she left the company as damaged goods, but one thing was always clear: She was superb at marketing—especially at marketing herself. She put herself in a company TV ad and appeared on numerous magazine covers, garnering many flattering profiles while her company was flailing. (During her five and a half years at H.P., she was on the cover of Forbes, Fortune, or BusinessWeek at least 10 times.) Now she's taking those same skills and using them, to McCain's advantage, to make the Republican Party palatable outside the grumpy-white-male demographic, which happens to be precisely what the G.O.P. needs. "We had her do a video the first day she got the job," says Frank Donatelli, a veteran Republican operative and the R.N.C.'s deputy chairman. "She nailed it on the first take."

Reviving the ailing brand of the Republican Party is no easy task with a faltering Republican president in the White House. But Fiorina is frank—strikingly frank—about the need to do so: "In the case of John McCain, we have a strong brand, and we need to get his message out," she says. "With the Republican Party, we need to reach out, which is more difficult when we have a president with popularity ratings that are very, very low."

Fiorina's relationship with McCain goes back to 2000, when he was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, and she was running H.P. and lobbying to keep internet purchases free of sales tax. McCain agreed; the two clicked. She wasn't active in his presidential campaign that year—but in 2007 she signed on, big-time.

A lifelong Republican who didn't talk much about politics during her business career, Fiorina is classically conservative, which makes her a good fit for McCain, who needs to bring large numbers of core Republican voters to the polls in order to win. She's against abortion rights (though, like McCain, she does support stem-cell research). She's opposes gun control, she's a free-trader, and she's a tax cutter: "It's the only way to spur in-no-va-tion," she says, rolling out each syllable.

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