I tried to reply in-thread above, but something about the layout made it really hard for me to follow along and make sure I was stubbing-in in the right place. So apologies!
I think Fiorina is very impressive. I am skeptical of her business record as I noted above, but I think Doc's relation to a baseball GM is pretty good. It's so hard to pin all success or failure on a CEO. I think her tenure was net-negative, but not "worst CEO ever" as she'll likely be painted.
As a candidate, she's super powerful. Her rise is not surprising to me at all. She speaks forcefully and with clarity, which when compared to most of the other men on stage, is very refreshing to the ears of a voter I would have to think. This is where having a career in business vs. on the Senate floor really comes in handy.
Where I think she'll falter is when the spotlight gets shined onto the actual content of those sound bites... During the 2nd debate, her bit about the abortion videos was powerful. I'm staunchly pro-choice and pro-PP, and it had me on my heels. I did some research afterwards, and it turns out her characterisation of the content of those videos was completely fabricated. Surely a video with that content *does* exist somewhere, but it's not in the PP videos she was referencing or that the audience *thought* she was referencing. Her comments about the 6th fleet came across well too, I thought. But again, once I dug into it more, I found it less impressive. See this Washington Post article on the fabrications (not excatly a liberal rag): https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/carly-fiorinas-de...
Truth be told, her foreign policy ideas scare the heck out of me. There's a lot of bluster about "no more diplomacy" and "not talking" to people, but I thin if anything diplomacy has proven to work extremely well.
There's also the issue of HP's dealings with Iran during her tenure as CEO, flaunting economic santions. She's denied this of couse, referencing the SEC's reponse on the topic, but when really dug into the argument starts to fall apart. USA Today of all places has a pretty good recap of it all: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2015/09/23/fact-ch...
My exec sum, is that I think she is incredibly smart and driven, easily stands out among many of the GOP candidates, and will be in the race for a while. I also think it is fantastic to have another woman running. But the content of some of her ideas do not stand up in my mind.