Carly Fiorina Stands on Sarah Palin’s Shoulders

You may have liked the low-fives, the Secret Service codenames, or Jeb Bush’s talk of toking, but by many accounts, the high point of Wednesday's prime-time Republican presidential debate came about an hour in, when CNN moderator Jake Tapper asked Carly Fiorina about Donald Trump’s remarks about her face. (Specifically, Trump had told a Rolling Stone reporter, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?”) Eyes were beginning to wander to other, smaller screens, or maybe even glaze over at that point in the festivities, but Fiorina marched American pupils back to attention. “I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said,” she pronounced. Her face, in that moment, was a lapidarist’s dream: the savviest, most polished stone. She seems, sometimes, to speak from a teleprompter in her mind.

No matter how many of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates stand onstage, in a given primary moment, Fiorina is the only one who isn’t in a suit and tie. The predictable, servile eye is drawn to this difference. Fiorina knows this, and on Wednesday took advantage. “Women all over this country heard very clearly,” she told Tapper, just as she told him, after the first debate, “Women understood that comment” from Trump about Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly. “And yes,” she continued, “it is offensive.” Amid the same controversy, Fiorina told CBS, “I think women of all kinds are really sort of horrified by this.”