Carly Fiorina: A Candidate to Take Our Country Back

In eight months, the Republican nominee for President will be standing on the debate stage with Hillary Clinton with nothing less than the future of our great nation hanging in the balance.

Nobody understands the importance of this moment better than the people of New Hampshire, who for almost 100 years have had the honor of holding the first presidential primary, charting the course for our nation through the windy, stormy, taciturn weather of presidential politics.

On February 9, we in the Granite state will cast our ballots. As a proud New Hampshire native son and voter, I take this responsibility seriously and am not persuaded easily. It is in my nature to take a good long measure of each candidate, then look again, and then look some more. After getting to know the candidates in this field, I am convinced the candidate to stand on that debate stage with Hillary Clinton must be Carly Fiorina.

I urge my fellow New Hampshire Republicans and independent voters again to take the measure of this remarkable woman. Strongly conservative, principled, unwavering, articulate, genuine and tough. She represents every quality that distinguishes our party from the opposition, and for that reason is the candidate Hillary Clinton least wants to face.

While the current field of candidates is strong and I would never disparage any candidate personally, Carly is unique in both the way she conducts herself and the positions she advocates.  She is an outsider who has rejected a political class that has contributed to an erosion of our nation and an abandonment of our values of faith, value for life, and cherished principles of individual liberty and free-market principles.

She has avoided petty squabbles, silly arguments, and has not defended herself through lawyer-like double speak defending her past.  Her extraordinary policy focus has always remained on what matters most: protecting our nation from threats foreign and domestic; jump-starting our economy through private sector technology and innovation not government command and control; and preserving our liberties and freedoms to spare our children and grandchildren from the future despair of a nation that continues to slide into decay and chaos.

I was introduced to this amazing woman through my work at Americans United for Life in Washington, D.C. and have seen firsthand her pro-life leadership. I can attest that Carly is not content only to defend the pro-life movement, rather she will be a fearless, articulate and vocal advocate on behalf of women and the unborn. Her words on this matter are both thoughtful and inspiring, able to pierce the heart and persuade through her faith and personal journey.

Carly is not a woman of government, but a person entirely of the private sector and free market, who started her career as a secretary, working her way up to lead a Fortune 50 company in the complex technology industry. She thrived in a world where innovation, industry and efficiency were life and death. She will not go to Washington to “fix” and manage a government of more than 2.7 million non-military employees — she is going there to take our government back, for We the People. What other candidate has the background, experience and know-how to actually accomplish this?

And yet, we have seen the media—the very definition of the establishment—attempt to usurp New Hampshire voters by arbitrarily limiting the number of candidates on the debate stage while simultaneously deciding how much time to give candidates on their networks. We know the current polls track closely with how much time the media gives a given candidate. At the same time, we also know polls are getting less and less reliable. The week of the Kentucky election this year, the polls were 13 points off from Election Day. But media companies are dictating which candidates can debate when they are separated by less than 2 percentage points of each other and when the polls own margin of error is 5 points.

Fellow New Hampshire voters, it’s time to take our country back—from the political class and the media elites. As our nation faces perils like never before, now is the time to nominate a candidate who believes in citizen government and doesn’t take “this is the way it’s always been done” as an answer.

We need a nominee who is a committed conservative who will stand for life and religious liberty. We need a nominee that will beat Hillary Clinton by holding her accountable for her failures. That candidate is Carly Fiorina.

Ovide Lamontagne is a shareholder with the law firm of Bernstein Shur, a former Republican nominee for Governor, and Chairman of Carly for President in New Hampshire.