Progressive and Conservative as Defined by Carly Fiorina, GOP only Female Presidential Candidate for 2016 election.

I heard the only female GOP (Republican) presidential candidate define and differentiate between Conservative and Progressive political inclination, and I was shocked when I heard what she has to say. Carly Fiorina was former disgraced CEO of Fortune 50 Company, HP. She led a merger between HP and Compaq that cost loss of about 30,000 jobs because the company shipped some of the jobs abroad to China and elsewhere. She has been “successful” in the management world by leading horrific mergers like this that led to poverty for millions of Americans. I am commenting because, if as a taxpayer in the US, someone like this is seeking the position of the president, we better beware. This has nothing to do with her being a female candidate. In fact, if I did not know her story, I would have tipped her as a frontline candidate based on the first GOP presidential debate.

Her actual comments: “I’m a conservative because I know that no one of us is any better than any other one of us,” Fiorina said. “Each of us are gifted by God. All of us want to live lives of dignity and purpose and meaning. And I know that our values, our principles and our policies work better to lift everyone up.”

She then defined progressive message as this: “some of us are smarter than others. Some of us are better than others. Some of you really can’t live lives of dignity and purpose and meaning, But don’t worry. Some of us are going to take care of the rest of you.”

This is what I think she said, paraphrasing: “The difference between conservative and progressive is that conservatives believe that we are equally endowed, and not one is better than the other in anything, and progressives recognize the inequality of opportunity and want to perpetuate and take advantage of it, that is what I believe, I am a conservative”. 

This is a thwarted definition of "Progressivism" and Conservatism. She took a bit and pieces from what we know both side stands for, to make her side (conservatives) look good. We all know that conservatives who are mostly Republicans who believe that we all have equal opportunity, so those who are poor today are poor because they have refused to take advantage of the opportunities they have had, therefore they should be denied of the needed help to get out of poverty. They want to defund or cancel food stamp, cancel policy on helping poor kids who are first timer to college from getting the needed scholarship from government, etc.

This ideology is the reason why conservatives who have never tasted poverty in their lives because some of them, generation of their fathers prospered on the free labor provided by slaves forcefully shipped from their land in Africa, and poor factory workers who toil day and night to earn minimum wage, for people like her to earn bogus bonus over and over again. They are for developing and investing in weapons to continue to terrorize the rest of the world at the expense of re-building America’s dilapidated educational system (in comparison to their counterpart in Europe and Asia), instead of helping poor kids to fund college admission, kids who have the potential to be the first college graduate from their family. I am a scientist, a Food Process Engineer, I know my brain cannot hold most content of rocket of science, I can never be LeBron James in basketball game, or out run Usain bolt, my wife is more handy than myself – I know that because on many occasions she fixed things I could not fix. The notion that we are equally endowed is interpreted as “those who are poor, are poor because they are lazy and not ambitious enough”, this is nonsense. Statistics support the fact that the opportunity you encounter determines whether a person will reach his or her potential. You need to live in Bronx and East end of New York to know that opportunities are not equally distributed in the US (this is not peculiar to US alone). Particularly how much of gap exist between Caucasia and African America – “white” kids have far better opportunities than “black” kids. Just look at the population demographics in almost all US cities and towns.

Even when opportunities are equal, gifting are different. One will excel in one thing than the other. In my college days, the student with the poorest CGPA in my class was the BEST in Engineering Drawing – he was inherently gifted in drawing, I was second to him. From that experience and many more I have encountered in my short life, I realized that we are “equally gifted for different things”. Some will never realize that gift, because the opportunity to test them out has not being presented to them. How will a kid know he has a basketball gift if he has no access to a basketball, court or seen any basketball game? How will a kid know he is gifted in Maths when his teachers are the list trained to help him realize his gift through constant tutoring and homework? How will a kid know he could be a playwright if there are no books to read, no good teacher to guide him/ her into excellence. The example can go on and on. Accepting the fact that we are all gifted is not enough, supporting policies that will provide for environment that will lead to the realization of that gift is far more important.

It is the height of foolishness to make an untrue remark like Fiorina did, in order to make political gain.