Fiorina's Flip-Flop on Clinton

WASHINGTON -- Carly Fiorina says some, well, interesting things while waiting to go on camera.

In 2010, the then-GOP Senate nominee went all middle-school-cafeteria on her Democratic opponent's hairdo. "God, what is that hair? Sooo yesterday," Fiorina, already miked up, commented, quoting an aide's assessment. Two years earlier, in the makeup room at ABC's "This Week" with me, Fiorina said something that, at the time, was mildly interesting, but is now revelatory. It was May 2008, close to the end of the long primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and we were discussing the two Democratic contenders.

At which point Fiorina, then a campaign surrogate for presumptive GOP nominee John McCain, offered some unprompted praise for Clinton: If Fiorina hadn't been backing McCain, she told me, she would have been for Clinton.

"That's off the record," Fiorina immediately added.

Here a pause for a discussion of journalism ethics. The commonly understood rule governing when quotations are not for the record requires the source to state that position in advance, so that the reporter can agree to the limitation or not.

As veteran editor Norman Pearlstine wrote in a useful set of journalistic guidelines: "We do not allow sources to change the ground rules governing specific quotations after the fact. Once a quote is on the record, it remains there."

The Washington Post Style Guide cautions that "inexperienced sources -- usually ordinary people who unexpectedly find themselves the news -- should clearly understand that you are a reporter and should not be surprised to find themselves quoted in the newspaper."

The first female CEO of a Fortune 100 company and authorized surrogate for a presidential nominee does not count as an inexperienced source. I didn't challenge Fiorina at the time and didn't use her comments because they didn't strike me as newsworthy enough: By that point, Clinton was clearly not going to be the Democratic nominee.

Now is different, for two reasons. First, Fiorina's praise of Clinton then contradicts her attacks on Clinton now. Second, Fiorina is no longer a surrogate; she's a candidate, for the highest office in the land.

At the time, Fiorina's comments were surprising but not entirely outlandish. She and Clinton had been two prominent jousters at the glass ceiling. Fiorina was on a mission to woo Clinton voters for McCain. She was outspoken on issues of gender equity, questioning why many health plans covered erectile dysfunction drugs but not birth-control pills, and, in the process embarrassing her own candidate, who had voted twice against requiring insurers to cover contraceptives.

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