On a re­cent week­day morn­ing, I drive to Carly Fior­ina’s house in North­ern Vir­gin­ia, about 40 minutes from Wash­ing­ton. She lives in a gated com­munity down a drive­way so long that it’s lined with its own street­lamps. Her $6.1 mil­lion house sits on five acres, with un­ob­struc­ted views of the Po­tom­ac River. After I park my car, she lets out her two York­shire ter­ri­ers, Max and Snick­ers, to greet me.

As I walk in­to the huge foy­er with a sweep­ing stair­case, Fior­ina takes my coat, while her dogs run in circles and yip. (“They think they’re big­ger than they are. Don’t dis­suade them!” she later jokes.) To­geth­er, Fior­ina and her hus­band, Frank, make for a warm, friendly couple. They look young­er than two people in their 60s: both trim, en­er­get­ic, and smartly dressed. Frank has gone out and bought donuts for us, still wrapped in a yel­low box, which Fior­ina keeps of­fer­ing me. Are you sure you don’t want any cof­fee, juice, or wa­ter? she asks. They treat me like I’m a new neigh­bor who’s stopped by to watch Sunday foot­ball.

Even­tu­ally, Fior­ina and I head up­stairs to her study, where we talk about her (po­ten­tial) pres­id­en­tial plans. She has been sig­nal­ing for months that she may run, and I want to hear more about her brand of polit­ics. When I ask how she would dis­tin­guish her­self from the cur­rent crop of Re­pub­lic­an can­did­ates, she says: “Well, I think I’m dif­fer­ent in every re­spect. Clearly, I bring a dif­fer­ent ex­per­i­ence set. I bring a dif­fer­ent per­spect­ive. As a res­ult, I speak about the is­sues just dif­fer­ently. I think I tend to fo­cus on solu­tions and res­ults. I think I have a dif­fer­ent voice.” Asked what would be her path to vic­tory—what states, for in­stance, would she win?—she says, “Well, I think it is hard for every­one to see how it will go down. We’re all con­sumed with polit­ics all of the time. We don’t know what the field is yet. We’re a year away. No one has of­fi­cially de­clared. I think there is a lot that is go­ing to un­fold.”

Fior­ina of­fers no short­age of these gen­er­al­it­ies about her pos­sible polit­ic­al ca­reer—un­til the con­ver­sa­tion turns to Hil­lary Clin­ton. At that point, she be­comes much more an­im­ated and de­tailed. “I think her clumsy at­tempt to chan­nel Eliza­beth War­ren and say, ‘Don’t let any­one tell you that busi­nesses cre­ate jobs’ was not just clumsy, it be­lies a lack of un­der­stand­ing about the way the eco­nomy works,” she says. Fior­ina also cri­ti­cizes the former sec­ret­ary of State’s hand­ling of the Benghazi at­tack and pre­dicts that Clin­ton “will play the gender card over and over again, which is un­for­tu­nate but pre­dict­able.”

For Fior­ina—the former CEO of Hew­lett-Pack­ard, whose only pre­vi­ous at­tempt at elec­ted of­fice was an un­suc­cess­ful 2010 bid to dis­place Sen. Bar­bara Box­er—go­ing after Clin­ton has proved to be a fruit­ful tac­tic. Last month, she got high marks and sub­stan­tial me­dia at­ten­tion for a speech she gave at the Iowa Free­dom Sum­mit. Speak­ing along­side oth­er GOP hope­fuls, she un­leashed a zinger at Clin­ton that played well with the con­ser­vat­ive crowd. “Like Hil­lary Clin­ton, I too have traveled hun­dreds of thou­sands of miles around the globe,” she told the audi­ence. “But un­like her, I have ac­tu­ally ac­com­plished something. You see, Mrs. Clin­ton, fly­ing is not an ac­com­plish­ment; it is an activ­ity.”

Fior­ina had writ­ten the speech by hand on the plane en route to Iowa, but she didn’t add that Clin­ton line un­til a few hours be­fore she took the stage. It proved to be a great de­cision. “Carly Fior­ina, Scott Walk­er stocks rise after Iowa ap­pear­ances,” trum­peted a head­line in The Wash­ing­ton Times the next day. “Carly Fior­ina: The GOP’s weapon against Hil­lary Clin­ton?” asked For­tune shortly there­after.

Un­der­ly­ing all this praise for Fior­ina is a sense that, as the only Re­pub­lic­an wo­man who is likely to run for pres­id­ent, she might be uniquely able to cri­ti­cize Clin­ton without draw­ing charges of sex­ism. “The most ef­fect­ive way to cri­ti­cize a wo­man is to have an­oth­er wo­man do it,” a Re­pub­lic­an strategist told Time last year.

This lo­gic (however gendered and ar­gu­ably sex­ist) may well get Fior­ina an ini­tial hear­ing from the Re­pub­lic­an elect­or­ate in the months to come. But if that ini­tial hear­ing goes well, then the tough ques­tions will be­gin: Why is she run­ning for pres­id­ent? What is her es­sen­tial mes­sage to GOP voters? And, bey­ond an abil­ity to lam­baste Clin­ton, is she ac­tu­ally a good mes­sen­ger?

“Carly has this kind of a sense about her­self that she has something defin­it­ive to give,” says Ken Khachi­gi­an, a law­yer who was an ad­viser on her 2010 Sen­ate cam­paign. “Obama jumped ahead of every­one to be pres­id­ent based on his story. She has her story, too.”

THE DAY AFTER I VIS­IT her house, I spend five hours with Fior­ina as she shuttles between ap­pear­ances. The first event takes place on the ninth floor of the Hay Adams hotel, where she is speak­ing to a crowd of roughly 60 people at an an­nu­al policy break­fast sponsored by the Leg­acy Polit­ic­al Fund, a con­ser­vat­ive PAC. (We later run in­to Re­pub­lic­an Sen. Pat Toomey just out­side the event and Sen. Marco Ru­bio in the hotel lobby.)The ma­jor prob­lem with Fior­ina’s un­suc­cess­ful 2010 bid against Sen. Bar­bara Box­er of Cali­for­nia was that she let Box­er’s cam­paign define her as an out-of-touch CEO. (Dav­id McNew/Getty Im­ages)

When I get there, Fior­ina is stand­ing at the po­di­um. On the left is an Amer­ic­an flag; be­hind her, through the ball­room’s wall of win­dows, you can see one of the best views in Wash­ing­ton: a pan­or­ama of the Wash­ing­ton Monu­ment, the White House, and the Treas­ury De­part­ment.

Fior­ina tells a story she has told many times be­fore about how she gradu­ated from Stan­ford Uni­versity with a de­gree in me­di­ev­al his­tory and philo­sophy. She pauses, so every­one can chuckle at the fool­ish­ness of these im­prac­tic­al ma­jors. “All dressed up, nowhere to go!” she says, pok­ing fun at her­self. She en­rolled in law school, hated it, and quit after a single semester. “And, now I’m really un­em­ploy­able,” she says. So, she finds a job as a re­cep­tion­ist at a nine-per­son firm where she typed, filed, and answered the phone. “I had no idea what I was go­ing to do with my life. I was just try­ing to pay the rent,” she says.

Even though I know the arc of her story, it is still fun to listen to her. Every­one else in the room seems to agree: No one gets up for more cof­fee or eggs from the break­fast buf­fet. No one around me cas­u­ally scrolls through email or Face­book. For a few minutes, she owns this room.

Fior­ina isn’t just good in group set­tings. She’s also a skilled one-on-one re­tail politi­cian. (Later in the day, we go to Fox News to­geth­er, where she is as kind to the makeup artists—ask­ing one about her cab­bage diet—as she is to Ed Henry, the net­work’s chief White House cor­res­pond­ent.) This tal­ent may trace back to her child­hood. When she was grow­ing up, her fam­ily moved so of­ten to ac­com­mod­ate her fath­er’s leg­al ca­reer—he was a law pro­fess­or, a law school dean, and a con­ser­vat­ive fed­er­al judge for the U.S. Court of Ap­peals for the 9th Cir­cuit—that Fior­ina ended up at­tend­ing high school in Africa, Cali­for­nia, and North Car­o­lina. The up­side of such con­stant change, she writes in her mem­oir, was that it taught her to al­ways ask people ques­tions as a way to make friends and learn about a new place. Much later, she writes, “I learned this is a great man­age­ment tool.”

After drop­ping out of law school and after her stint as a sec­ret­ary, Fior­ina even­tu­ally got her MBA and for about 20 years worked in vari­ous sales, mar­ket­ing, and strategy jobs for tele­com­mu­nic­a­tion gi­ants AT&T and Lu­cent Tech­no­lo­gies. Then, in 1998, a re­port­er for For­tune came to Lu­cent to in­ter­view Fior­ina and a cowork­er for a fea­ture on the most power­ful wo­men in busi­ness. At the time, Fior­ina was pres­id­ent of Lu­cent’s Glob­al Ser­vice Pro­vider di­vi­sion. Though her group was re­spons­ible for churn­ing out roughly $19 bil­lion in rev­en­ue an­nu­ally, Fior­ina wasn’t ex­actly a house­hold name. Yet when the For­tune piece came out, she was ranked in the No. 1 slot—ahead of Oprah Win­frey and Martha Stew­art. Fior­ina topped the list, For­tune wrote, be­cause she “sells no less than ‘the things that make com­mu­nic­a­tions work’—big-tick­et net­work­ing sys­tems and soft­ware for tele­phone, In­ter­net, and wire­less-ser­vice op­er­at­ors in 43 coun­tries around the globe. In short, she’s at the cen­ter of the on­go­ing tech­no­logy re­volu­tion that’s chan­ging how we live and work.”

After that, re­cruit­ers for ma­jor com­pan­ies star­ted call­ing. The call that in­trigued Fior­ina most came from Hew­lett-Pack­ard. Soon enough, she was the com­pany’s new CEO—the first to come from out­side HP, and the first fe­male head of a For­tune 20 com­pany.

When Fior­ina took over HP, Frank re­tired from his own ca­reer as an AT&T ex­ec­ut­ive. Un­able to have chil­dren her­self, Fior­ina had helped to raise her hus­band’s two daugh­ters as her own. Now, Frank op­ted to stay home, sup­port Fior­ina, and travel with her—a move that Carly’s own fath­er did not ap­prove of for the first few years, Frank says. “It was a very prac­tic­al con­sid­er­a­tion,” Carly re­calls. “By the time I was named CEO of HP, we either would nev­er see one an­oth­er or something had to give. It had to be his de­cision, and I’m grate­ful that he made that de­cision.”

IN HIND­SIGHT, the HP board of dir­ect­ors made an un­usu­al choice by pick­ing her; she’d nev­er run a com­pany, and she had a mar­ket­ing, rather than an en­gin­eer­ing, back­ground. “I thought she was one of the best sales­wo­men in the world from Lu­cent, but she was over her head at HP. I don’t think she had the tech­nic­al and man­age­ment skills,” says Mark An­der­son of Stra­tegic News Ser­vice, which cov­ers Sil­ic­on Val­ley.

Fior­ina also did not an­ti­cip­ate the at­ten­tion that she would re­ceive as the first fe­male CEO of HP. When a re­port­er asked about her gender at the press con­fer­ence an­noun­cing her ap­point­ment, she replied that “the glass ceil­ing doesn’t ex­ist,” a mo­ment she re­counts in her mem­oir. Even now, she doesn’t seem par­tic­u­larly hung up on the idea of gender. (When I ask her to name some Re­pub­lic­an politi­cians she ad­mires, she ini­tially names all men—George W. Bush, John Mc­Cain, Mitch Mc­Con­nell, and Paul Ry­an.)

From al­most the start, Fior­ina’s ten­ure at HP was con­tro­ver­sial. The For­tune art­icle and her own en­er­get­ic man­ner pro­pelled her to such a level of celebrity that, at times, it seemed to over­take her work at HP. “She spent a lot of time on the road and be­ing pho­to­graphed with the products, ex­cept that none of the products did very well,” An­der­son says. She ap­peared on the cov­er of busi­ness magazines, traveled around the world to meet HP em­ploy­ees and cus­tom­ers, and did the voice-over her­self for a new HP ad that was in­ten­ded to both rebrand and pay homage to the com­pany’s en­tre­pren­eur­i­al ori­gins. She also over­saw a con­tro­ver­sial mer­ger with Com­paq, and fought a very pub­lic proxy battle that pit­ted her against one of the chil­dren of the com­pany’s founders.

For Wall Street, though, the most sa­li­ent fact about Fior­ina was the bot­tom line. Dur­ing the five-plus years that she led HP, the stock price de­creased by more than 50 per­cent. HP’s third-quarter earn­ings for 2004 missed the com­pany’s pro­jec­ted fore­cast by a wide mar­gin.

In Feb­ru­ary 2005, the HP board fired Fior­ina. The next day, the com­pany’s stock rose by 6.9 per­cent, and The Wall Street Journ­al re­por­ted that some em­ploy­ees re­acted to the news of her dis­missal by hold­ing cham­pagne toasts.

Ac­counts of why she was fired dif­fer de­pend­ing on whom you ask. Fior­ina blames her de­par­ture on a num­ber of factors, none of them of her own mak­ing. She was an out­sider and the first fe­male CEO of the com­pany, she points out; plus, the HP board was dys­func­tion­al. (Two board mem­bers left roughly a year and a half after Fior­ina’s de­par­ture be­cause they were im­plic­ated in a massive scan­dal in­volving the in­vest­ig­a­tion of leaks of con­fid­en­tial in­form­a­tion.)

But what about the com­pany’s weak fin­an­cial per­form­ance? “Yes, there were data points that the press strung to­geth­er. But what the press missed at the time, and what is fac­tu­ally clear when you go back and look, is the con­text,” Fior­ina says. “So, the con­text was that vir­tu­ally every tech­no­logy com­pany’s stock was down at the very same rate—Or­acle, Cisco, you name it.”

Her de­tract­ors, and much of the busi­ness press, told it dif­fer­ently. Ven­ture cap­it­al­ist Tom Per­kins (who pushed for Fior­ina’s ouster as a board mem­ber and later quit, dis­mayed by the leak­ing scan­dal) says she got fired be­cause she was such a high-fly­ing, big-pic­ture CEO that she did not have time to ex­ecute her ideas. “The board thought she was do­ing too much her­self and wanted her to hire a few ex­ec­ut­ive vice pres­id­ents,” he says. “It turned in­to a stan­doff, which Carly lost with the board. It did not have to be this way.” (Years later, with the re­la­tion­ship men­ded, Per­kins hos­ted a fun­draiser in Cali­for­nia for Fior­ina’s Sen­ate race.)

Fior­ina’s HP ten­ure is a well-known story in the busi­ness world, so I called a few pro­fess­ors who study com­pan­ies and CEOs for a broad­er as­sess­ment. I wanted to know how they would grade her lead­er­ship, a rel­ev­ant ques­tion for someone who wants to be pres­id­ent. “If I re­serve F for some­body who is steal­ing, I guess a C or C-minus,” says Jef­frey Sonnen­feld, a pro­fess­or at the Yale School of Man­age­ment. “Had she not gone in there, it would have been a much bet­ter com­pany. You can’t ar­gue that it’s bet­ter for her lead­er­ship.”

FIOR­INA DE­PAR­TED HP with a $21 mil­lion sev­er­ance pack­age. She took six months off, wrote a mem­oir called Tough Choices (not to be con­fused with Clin­ton’s Hard Choices), and hit the speak­ing cir­cuit. From al­most the start, Fior­ina’s ten­ure at HP was con­tro­ver­sial. (JOHN G. MA­BAN­GLO/AFP/Getty Im­ages)

The day after she left HP, Fior­ina tells me, Pres­id­ent Bush called and asked her to come to the Oval Of­fice to talk about pos­sible po­s­i­tions. (She also says that dur­ing her HP ten­ure, in 2004, Bush had offered her the post of Home­land Se­cur­ity sec­ret­ary. A Bush spokes­per­son could not con­firm or deny that an of­fer was made.) But her first ma­jor for­ay onto the polit­ic­al stage came in 2008 when she worked for the Mc­Cain cam­paign as an ad­viser. It was then, she says, that she real­ized how much she en­joyed the cam­paign trail. “I’ve al­ways drawn my en­ergy from people. I find it really fas­cin­at­ing and in­ter­est­ing and fun to be able to be out there and talk­ing about what is go­ing on in their lives,” she says. This worked fairly well un­til she told a TV an­chor dur­ing a routine ap­pear­ance that neither Mc­Cain nor his run­ning mate, Sarah Pal­in, could run a ma­jor cor­por­a­tion. After that, seni­or cam­paign ad­viser Steve Schmidt said that she was nev­er go­ing on TV for the cam­paign again.

Fior­ina en­dured per­son­al chal­lenges around that time as well. In early 2009, she was dia­gnosed with breast can­cer. (She’s healthy and can­cer-free now, she tells me—and in the best shape of her life.) Then, in mid-Oc­to­ber 2009, her young­er daugh­ter, Lori, died alone in her apart­ment at the age of 35. Fior­ina does not like to dis­cuss it, ex­cept to say that “she struggled with ad­dic­tions, and they over­came her.” A few weeks later, Fior­ina an­nounced her run for the Sen­ate seat from Cali­for­nia held by Box­er.

Friends say that when Fior­ina was com­ing up through the busi­ness world, she nev­er ex­pressed any in­terest in polit­ics. “Polit­ics nev­er came up. It really didn’t,” says Kathy Fitzger­ald, an old friend of Fior­ina’s from their Lu­cent days. “She nev­er said, ‘Someday I want to be pres­id­ent of the United States.’ ” In fact, Fior­ina failed to even vote dur­ing the 10 years she lived and worked in New Jer­sey, ac­cord­ing to a 2009 San Fran­cisco Chron­icle in­vest­ig­a­tion. Fred Dav­is, one of her former cam­paign con­sult­ants and a well-known GOP ad man, puts it this way: “I don’t think Carly had an in­nate love of polit­ics, as a little girl, like Harry Re­id or Mitch Mc­Con­nell. It was like be­ing the CEO of something new, big, and im­port­ant.”

When I ask Marty Wilson, the man­ager of her Sen­ate cam­paign, why he thinks Fior­ina was ini­tially drawn to polit­ics, there’s a long pause on the line, so long I be­lieve that we’ve been dis­con­nec­ted. “I’m not sure of her mo­tiv­a­tion,” says Wilson, who has also worked for former Cali­for­nia Govs. Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwar­zeneg­ger. “She grav­it­ated to­ward pub­lic policy and built up some friend­ships with vari­ous pub­lic fig­ures like Sen­at­or Mc­Cain. One thing leads to an­oth­er.”

Be­hind the scenes, the cam­paign got off to an odd start. Ac­cus­tomed to run­ning a ma­jor glob­al cor­por­a­tion, Fior­ina treated early brain­storm­ing ses­sions like board­room present­a­tions, with Power­Point slides and or­gan­iz­a­tion­al charts, say two people in­volved on the cam­paign. It seemed un­ne­ces­sary since, at that time, just a hand­ful of people worked for her.

While Fior­ina may have a long­time mar­keter’s sense of how to im­prove the GOP’s im­age, it’s not clear how good she is at mar­ket­ing her­self.

Fior­ina cer­tainly ex­celled at the per­son­al part of cam­paign­ing. Rachel Mich­elin, who runs the non­par­tis­an, non­profit group Cali­for­nia Wo­men Lead, re­mem­bers watch­ing Fior­ina tell a crowd in a loc­al high school gym the story of how she star­ted her ca­reer as a sec­ret­ary. “I watched the wo­men, and that really res­on­ated with them,” Mich­elin says. At a dif­fer­ent event, Fior­ina im­pressed Mich­elin by show­ing up and know­ing all about her group ahead of time. “She had done her own home­work and took the time to know what we were about,” Mich­elin re­calls.

But the ma­jor prob­lem with Fior­ina’s 2010 Sen­ate cam­paign—in ad­di­tion to the fact that she was a pro-life Re­pub­lic­an in a solidly lib­er­al state—came from the way she let Box­er’s cam­paign define her: as an out-of-touch CEO. One pro-Box­er ad, for in­stance, fea­tured a stat that Fior­ina had laid off 30,000 work­ers and shipped jobs to China—fol­lowed by a clip say­ing she was proud of her HP work. Fior­ina’s cam­paign nev­er got out from un­der these at­tacks. “It’s fair cri­ti­cism to say that we didn’t re­spond ad­equately,” Fior­ina tells me. “There were people [on the cam­paign] who really thought that the only thing we needed to do was to fo­cus on Box­er’s re­cord, and I think that was wrong in ret­ro­spect. We needed to fo­cus and cla­ri­fy mine as well. Live and learn.”

Those charges cer­tainly will come up again if Fior­ina joins the pres­id­en­tial race. “Carly needs to work di­li­gently to avoid the Mitt Rom­ney com­plex and not be tagged as an out-of-touch one-per­cen­t­er,” says Jeff Cor­less, the polit­ic­al dir­ect­or of her 2010 Sen­ate race.

I press Fior­ina on this point after the Hay Adams break­fast. How will she fend off at­tacks that she’s wealthy or out of touch in 2016? “Well, we’re not as wealthy as Hil­lary and Bill Clin­ton, not by a long shot, which is im­port­ant to re­mem­ber,” she shoots back from her corner of the Jeep. “You’re right, the class card is one the Demo­crats play, but Hil­lary and Bill Clin­ton are worth a lot more than Carly and Frank Fior­ina, so that will be an in­ter­est­ing thing.”

Fior­ina ended up los­ing the Sen­ate race by 10 points. She and Frank left Cali­for­nia and moved to North­ern Vir­gin­ia to live near their daugh­ter, Tracy, and their two grand­daugh­ters, now ages 18 and 10. Fior­ina threw her­self in­to of­fi­cial Wash­ing­ton. She served as vice chair in 2012 for the Na­tion­al Re­pub­lic­an Sen­at­ori­al Com­mit­tee and now is chair of the Amer­ic­an Con­ser­vat­ive Uni­on Found­a­tion. She’s not even run­ning for pres­id­ent yet, and already her days are filled with TV ap­pear­ances, work for the non­profits on whose boards she sits, and time spent on her PAC, the Un­lock­ing Po­ten­tial Pro­ject—which has raised $1.8 mil­lion, so far, and em­ploys 15 staffers and con­sult­ants.

UNLOCK­ING PO­TEN­TIAL isn’t just the name of Fior­ina’s PAC. It’s one of her sig­na­ture phrases—a gentler ver­sion of the con­ser­vat­ive concept of Amer­ic­ans help­ing oth­er Amer­ic­ans, in­stead of just lean­ing on big gov­ern­ment. I first en­counter “un­lock­ing po­ten­tial” in her 2006 mem­oir. Today, it is an in­teg­ral part of her stump speech. The idea is that she ad­vanced from sec­ret­ary to CEO be­cause oth­ers saw po­ten­tial in her that she ori­gin­ally did not see in her­self. Every­one has po­ten­tial, she ar­gues, as she tries to paint a more in­clus­ive por­trait of the GOP. Like any good mar­keter, it seems, Fior­ina has her taglines—and she will re­peat them re­lent­lessly un­til you re­mem­ber them.Fior­ina, chair­wo­man of the Amer­ic­an Con­ser­vat­ive Uni­on Found­a­tion, speaks at last year’s CPAC. She is slated to speak again at this year’s con­fer­ence. (Rex Fea­tures via AP Im­ages)

In­deed, as I spend time with Fior­ina, it be­comes clear to me that, more than any­thing else, her ideas about the Re­pub­lic­an Party boil down to a set of mar­ket­ing goals. Fior­ina isn’t try­ing to re­form the party ideo­lo­gic­ally; she is a stand­ard small-gov­ern­ment, less-reg­u­la­tion, pro-life Re­pub­lic­an, and doesn’t seem es­pe­cially in­ter­ested in mov­ing the party to the left or to the right. For her, the chal­lenge fa­cing the GOP is the need to mar­ket it­self dif­fer­ently. “If you’re a single mom strug­gling to raise two kids, and Re­pub­lic­ans are talk­ing about smal­ler gov­ern­ment and less tax­a­tion, you don’t un­der­stand what that does for you. In fact, you sus­pect, if that’s all you hear, you think that hurts you,” she says. “We don’t fin­ish the sen­tence for people. I don’t think our policies are wrong. I think we don’t con­nect them in per­son­al ways to people’s lives.”

She adds: “I think in his heart, Mitt Rom­ney is a good man with great em­pathy. “… But for whatever reas­on, that didn’t come across. I think he’s not the only one who has talked about, ‘Well, if people are on gov­ern­ment handouts, they’re not with us.’ That is not only dis­respect­ful and dis­missive of those people, it’s not true.”

One ma­jor irony for Fior­ina is that, while she may have a long­time mar­keter’s sense of how to im­prove the GOP’s im­age, it’s not clear how good she is at mar­ket­ing her­self. In the wake of her HP fir­ing, she lost the PR battle (fairly or not) with her former bosses. And by de­fin­ing Fior­ina as an out-of-touch CEO in 2010, Box­er es­sen­tially out-mar­keted her.

Still, Fior­ina has an­oth­er qual­ity that, after spend­ing time with her, I began (in an odd way) to find im­press­ive: a self-con­fid­ence that seems to over­ride any and all coun­ter­vail­ing evid­ence. It’s a trait that you of­ten no­tice in power­ful or power-hungry men, but it’s rarer to en­counter that de­gree of self-as­sur­ance in a wo­man. For in­stance, Fior­ina sees the fact that she has nev­er held elec­ted of­fice as a strength, not a weak­ness. “There are a whole bunch of people who feel like you don’t have to be a pro­fes­sion­al politi­cian to hold of­fice,” she says. “I’m not the first per­son on the pres­id­en­tial stage who has nev­er held of­fice. Look at Her­man Cain or Ben Car­son. I think they have caught fire be­cause people are look­ing for something dif­fer­ent.”

Not every­one buys this lo­gic. “She’s ob­vi­ously a gif­ted and cap­able wo­man. But every pres­id­ent of the U.S. since the found­ing of the Re­pub­lic has fit of one of three cri­ter­ia,” says Whit Ayres, a long­time Re­pub­lic­an polit­ic­al con­sult­ant and poll­ster who is work­ing for Sen. Ru­bio. They have been either “a Found­ing Fath­er, a hero­ic mil­it­ary com­mand­er, or a cur­rent or former ma­jor polit­ic­al of­fice­hold­er. Every single one. If you can’t check one of those three boxes, you’re bet­ter off demon­strat­ing your polit­ic­al tal­ent for an of­fice oth­er than for the most im­port­ant job in the world.”

Her close friends ac­know­ledge Fior­ina’s su­preme self-con­fid­ence, but they view it as an ad­mir­able qual­ity. “I think every per­son has their won­der­ful side and their not-so-won­der­ful side,” says De­borah Bowker, a close friend since 1988 who re­cently traveled with Fior­ina to In­dia. “It is hard for me to hear people char­ac­ter­ize Carly in a neg­at­ive ca­ri­ca­ture. Part of it is that she’s su­per smart, strong-willed, and very at­tract­ive. If you’re a wo­man and you’re all those things, un­for­tu­nately, people want to find neg­at­ives.” Her close friend Kathy Fitzger­ald puts it an­oth­er way. “I don’t know how many politi­cians or busi­ness ex­ec­ut­ives you have in­ter­viewed,” she tells me. “I’ve nev­er met any of them who don’t have some amount of ego. You don’t want the shy­est kid in the room to be the lead­er.”

Fior­ina says she will de­cide if she’ll run in late April or May. This con­veni­ently co­in­cides with the re­lease of her second book, Rising to the Chal­lenge: My Lead­er­ship Jour­ney. (Dis­play­ing a mar­keter’s flare for sus­pense, she re­fuses to tell me the title of the book. Amazon, however, lists the title on its site.) This second book will cov­er the years since she left HP. When I ask about spe­cif­ic mo­ments in her life dur­ing our in­ter­view, she some­times falls back on the re­frain that she will cov­er it in great­er de­tail in her book—a clas­sic mar­ket­ing move if ever there was one.

If any­one seems to have any re­ser­va­tions about a po­ten­tial 2016 run, it’s Frank. After all, he has watched his wife get fired from HP quite pub­licly, lose a Sen­ate race, and be­come the sub­ject of thou­sands of news art­icle and head­lines. “It both­ers me to have people bad-mouth her,” he says as he sits at their kit­chen counter. “It both­ers me that she is go­ing to work very, very hard throughout these next couple of years. We’ve been through a lot. I worry about that some­times. I worry about her win­ning.”

Carly Fior­ina does not seem wor­ried. One cur­rent bit of con­ven­tion­al wis­dom about her holds that she will run for pres­id­ent simply to po­s­i­tion her­self as a po­ten­tial vice-pres­id­en­tial nom­in­ee or Cab­in­et sec­ret­ary. Ab­so­lutely not, she tells me. “Con­ven­tion­al wis­dom is fre­quently wrong,” she says. “If I do run and do this, I’m run­ning to be pres­id­ent.”