Fiorina is consistently the freshest representative of Republican and conservative views on the campaign hustings. If she doesn’t succeed in becoming the nominee, whoever does should borrow liberally from her rhetorical playbook.

Instead of merely gesturing in the direction of “economic growth” or “prosperity,” as most conservative candidates are wont to do, Fiorina makes a political argument. It runs this way: federal regulations are written by a political class of lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians for the benefit of well-connected corporate interests. Big business and big government are two sides of the same corrupt deal.

The “dirty little secret,” she has said, “of ObamaCare or Dodd-Frank or all of these other huge complicated pieces of regulation or legislation, is that they don’t get written on their own… They get written in part by lobbyists for big companies who want to understand that the rules are going to work for them.”

This manages to be much more accurate than the typical right-wing complaints of creeping socialism. It is also an implicit argument that she is free of such shenanigans as a non-career politician. Even on the stump in Iowa, Fiorina is willing to press this line of argument, saying that a tacit “Too Big To Fail” guarantee reduced 10 enormous banks to five gargantuan ones, even as small, community banks that make loans to small businesses begin to shrink under the weight of regulatory compliance and government burden.