Free Republic

In the week since Wednesday’s contentious GOP debate, Carly Fiorina has walked away the winner—both on social media and in the polls. She peaked in Google searches when mentioning her daughter—who passed away from an overdose—in response to a question about drug reform, earned the biggest applause of the night by cooly but deftly responding to Donald Trump’s criticisms of her appearance, and painted herself as a Washington outsider in a race where non-politicians like neurosurgeon Ben Carson and real estate mogul Trump are leading the pack. -snip- Much like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns during the 2008 subprime mortgage...

While Carly Fiorina has unquestionable debate skills, the more I research her background, the more troubled I become. While it's clear that she is -- politically speaking -- somewhere to the left of Jeb Bush on policy, it is her business record that is most alarming. Let me start with a little history lesson and a company called Lernout & Houspie. Founded in 1987 by two Belgians, L&H went public in 1995 on NASDAQ and operated from U.S. headquarters in Burlington, MA. Specializing in voice recognition software, L&H rode the tech boom to a peak market valuation of $10 billion....

As Carly Fiorina has risen in the polls over the last week, there is renewed focus on her controversial tenure as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. Yet her career at Lucent Technologies has been treated as little more than a footnote. It shouldn’t be. “My story — from secretary to C.E.O. — is only possible in this country,” Mrs. Fiorina likes to say on the hustings. In between her stint as a receptionist for a real estate company in the late 1970s and her being named Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive in 1999, Mrs. Fiorina worked for nearly 20 years at AT&T and...