It was a GOP primary ad, the Demon Sheep item. This Wikipedia page.
Of course the Republican poll leader has not really channeled the Gipper that way either. Honored in the breach?
And things have only started ...
___________UPDATE___________
For a hint of who Carly Fiorina is, after watching that video, remember to watch it, there is this, as a poohbah invited to give a Stanford commenceement speech, this alum said:
I'd like to begin my story at the History Corner.
The most valuable class I took at Stanford was not Econ 51. It was a graduate seminar called, believe it or not, "Christian, Islamic and Jewish Political Philosophies of the Middle Ages."
Each week, we had to read one of the great works of medieval philosophy: by Aquinas, Bacon, Abelard. These were huge texts - it seemed like we were reading 1,000 pages every week. And by the end of the week, we had to distill their philosophical discourse into two pages.
The process went something like this: First you'd shoot for 20 pages. Then you'd edit to 10. Then five. Then finally, two - a two-page, single-spaced paper that didn't merely summarize. It rendered all the fat out of a body of ideas, boiling it down to the very essence of its meaning.
And then you'd start all over again the next week, with a different massive text.
The philosophies and ideologies themselves certainly left an impression on me. But the rigor of the distillation process, the exercise of refinement, that's where the real learning happened. It was an incredible, heady skill to master. Through the years, I've used it again and again - the mental exercise of synthesis and distillation and getting to the very heart of things.
The intellectual process I learned in that class is also life's process. Because every life is a Great Work, with all the richness of its gifts and the wealth of its possibilities.
When you graduate from here, you exit with thousands of pages of personal text on which are inscribed beliefs and values shaped by years of education, family interactions, relationships, experiences. And buried within those thousands of pages is your personal truth, your essence.
So, how do you distill your life down to its essence?
It was that process of distillation, of honing a life and image into its fat-free essentials, core principles, personal truth, that led to Demon Sheep. The sincerity of the process is informative. Or am I too harsh?
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Demon Weed, this online People item. Read the item. With its own embedded sincere video. Aside from drug use by the deceased, bulimia is mentioned. Compare and contrast, this.
Is the fisking by the press of "Cinderella Secretary to Fortunate Fortune 20 CEO" beginning now that current poll numbers suggest it is worth the time? From that CNN "debate" Fiorina's intro blurb, per the Time transcript of the event reads:
FIORINA: Good evening. My story, from secretary to CEO, is only possible in this nation, and proves that everyone of us has potential. My husband, Frank, of 30 years, started out driving a tow truck for a family owned auto body shop. We have come to a pivotal point in our nation’s history where this nation’s possibilities and potential are being crushed by a government grown so big, so powerful, so inept, so corrupt, and a political class that refuses to do anything about it.
I am prepared to lead the resurgence of this great nation.
Long-time husband Frank, Tow-Truck Frank bootstrapping himself too? How does that square with the Telegraph item:
Todd Bartlem, who went on to become Fiorina's first husband, accuses her of creating a misleading mythology and 'losing her humanity' for a 'pathological' pursuit of power.
Speaking exclusively to Daily Mail Online, he said: 'It's not like she was a secretary for 15 years and rose up. She dropped out of law school, she settled on business school. It was all very planned.
'She's a very calculating person and her risks paid off but whenever I read descriptions about her life there'd always be this bit that she rose from a secretary at a real estate company to the head of AT&T…
'I mean she had a part-time position when she quit law school and she had to have money to pay the rent, so she worked as a secretary to a real estate firm in Palo Alto, but it was incidental.'
[...] Carly then attended Stanford University in California, where she majored in medieval history and philosophy.
It was there that she met Bartlem, now 61.
After graduating, Fiorina enrolled at UCLA Law School to please her father. But she had no interest in law and hated every minute of it.
Much to her father's dismay – she has recounted that he worried she would 'never amount to anything' – she quit after a few months. And then for the next few months she worked as a secretary before marrying Bartlem in 1977 and moving with him to Italy, where he had a job teaching with Johns Hopkins University.
Looking back, Bartlem said: 'I was useful to her then. I got her through graduate school and broke her out of going to law school. She tried to go to law school but she hated it and it was a big problem because her father wanted her to be a lawyer but I was her rebellion - her alternate lifestyle.'
Fiorina had no interest in politics or big business but, as she considered her options while living with him in Italy, she settled on business school - and the balance of their relationship began to shift.
The couple were married for seven years and they have had no contact since shortly after their divorce was finalized in 1984.
Bartlem has since remarried, and says his life has been happy and filfiling. [sic] But it is clear he is still not reconciled to the 'brutal' way his first wife behaved towards the end of their marriage.
He claims she had an affair with senior AT&T executive Frank Fiorina while they were still married - while she has always maintained she was divorced when her new romance began.
After she attended the University of Maryland's Robert H Smith School of Business, [date of graduation, 1980] Carly was accepted into AT&T's management development program – the real seat of her rise to prominence.
According to Fiorina, her marriage started to fail as her career bloomed. Writing in her memoir Tough Choices, she said: 'While we were married we were not peers… After I left graduate school and had entered the workforce something changed in my marriage.
'As my career at AT&T progresses, I became surer of myself. As I came into my own I grew up - Todd and I grew apart.'
Their marriage had begun happily, with their return from Italy marked by moving into a house in Silver Spring, Maryland. Her parents sent her a baby grand piano as a gift.
From Bartlem's perspective the marriage began to founder as Carly became more and more fixated with power, the corporate world - and Frank Fiorina.
He said of her career: 'That became her whole life because of the power thing that went with it, and, at the end of the day, everything got judged according to how useful it was towards allowing her to get ahead.
'I assume Frank was useful.'
Carly has implied that Bartlem, who had taken a job with the World Bank and was travelling a great deal for work, was unfaithful to her.
But Bartlem believes she was unfaithful to him with Frank.
He told Vanity Fair in 2002 that Carly was having an affair with Fiorina, saying there had been times when he called home at night and there was no answer.
Certainly neither account backs up the civilized, seamless march to divorce and remarriage with Frank that Carly has described in her own memoir.
Divorce papers seen by Daily Mail Online reveal a muddy truth of overlapping divorces.
[...] Carly joined AT&T in 1980. According to her later account of the ages of Frank's daughters when she met them, she was introduced to Frank the following year - 1981.
That was the same same [sic] year Frank's wife Patricia filed for divorce, in a case that dragged on for two years.
[...] In her most recent book Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey, Carly tells the tragic tale of her stepdaughter Lori, who died from prescription drug addiction.
[italics added] Frank drove truck. Okay, yeah, true enough he started there, in a family owned business; but on Carly's first contact it appears it was with "senior AT&T executive Frank Fiorina," regardless of whether intimacy was before or after the first marriage's divorce was finalized.
And the step-daughter at age 34 died from prescription drug complications of some nature, not Demon Weed, as Fiorina pontificated by implication at the CNN "debate." (Again, see the embedded video in the People item.)
Why would Fiorina, if speaking in candor to voters she'd want to trust her with their vote, say something true enough but shading clearly relevant facts in order to paint a picture which some might judge as ringing entirely to mislead? (Her business background was in sales, before HP.)
Who are we dealing with? If you want to paint a picture, to spin a yarn, spin an absolutely true one, please.
Wikipedia [source of dates added in brackets to the above quote] indicates the first marriage was dissolved in 1984, and Carley Fiorina married Frank Fiorina in 1985, and:
In 1980, at age 25, Fiorina joined AT&T as a management trainee, selling telephone services to big federal agencies. In 1990, at age 35, she became the company's first female officer as senior vice president overseeing the company's hardware and systems division. By age 40, she was heading the North American operations.
The big career move came five years into the second marriage, and Frank's position at AT&T at the time of that major Carly-1990 career boost at AT&T is unclear, so if any reader has a link to that it would be helpful. What is clear, it happened five years into the second marriage. And nepotism might, or might not, be involved.
Loose ends? Questions? Yes, and now that Fiorina has had her poll putsch, MSM might do more background fact-checking for the benefit of the voting public.
MORE UPDATE: For perspective, this NYT op-ed, where readers can word-search, Fiorina. Add WaPo, and what more MSM attention can there be? It will only grow, at a guess.
PARTING IMAGE, from the DEMON SHEEP Fiorina item from her past political life, the ad video ending:
It looks as much like a tar-and-feather thing, as sheep's clothing. In political hard ball, Trump, after saying it's not her face but her persona, will likely be low key about the Fiorina persona after that dustup, at least on record, while who knows, a Trump associate might off record talk with trusted media individuals, ... Indeed, such a conversation may already have happened.
There also is this parallel line of analysis to play out.
Whether Fiorina stays relevant as a top ticket or second spot possibility will likely play out in the next month or so - between "debates." Now that she's had the poll surge, it is time for MSM to reflect and the Fiorina gravitas question, which might have emerged later, likely will go front burner soon.
____________FURTHER UPDATE___________
Start with an online CNN item here. For a context. That Trump response to being confronted over a published remark, his "I was speaking as an entertainer" rejoinder; does it play well with you?
Please, weigh the question in the context of the Franken and McCollum past semi-discord and then working out the question of past Franken comedy in a then current political setting, where the upshot is both parties ended agreeing that no deep-seated real misogyny existed to burden the Franken candidacy, but that words of apology and explanation were helpful.
To the extent any reader on that situation was willing to cut Franken slack, as many were, Trump deserves some degree of caritas too, regarding his Fiorina comment. Although there are obvious differences in timing and direct cross-commentary.