Politics & Power Quote by Carly Fiorina

Citizen government, in Fiorina's hands, becomes a credential check. She takes Lincoln's sacred civics phrase, "of, by and for the people", and quietly recasts "the people" as a particular kind of person: the one who has signed paychecks. The move is rhetorically neat. It flatters voters with democratic language while steering them toward a technocratic conclusion: legitimacy comes from market fluency, not just ballots.

The intent is transparent campaign logic, tailored to California's post-recession anxiety and perennial jobs obsession. Fiorina is pitching executive experience as public service, arguing that job creation isn't an abstraction but a supply chain of decisions she claims to understand from the inside. "Knows where jobs come from" is doing heavy work here. It's a euphemism for the private sector and an implicit critique of career politicians, civil servants, and labor-oriented narratives. Jobs "come from" entrepreneurs and executives; government, at best, clears the runway.

The subtext is also defensive. Fiorina's business resume (especially her high-profile tenure at HP) carried baggage as well as prestige, and this framing tries to launder corporate authority into democratic authenticity. She isn't saying corporations should run government; she's saying government should be run by someone who thinks like a corporation, because the state's "most important issue" is economic throughput.

It's an argument that feels quintessentially late-20th/early-21st century: democracy is affirmed, then immediately subordinated to managerial expertise. The pitch isn't just policy. It's a theory of who deserves to lead.