In a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon kinda way — but still valid, if you ask me. Let’s review.

President Obama taps Stephen Chu as Secretary of Energy. Secretary Chu has a master plan of creating eight energy innovation hubs around the country, based on the Bell Labs model. Carly Fiorina, who worked at AT&T and was a key executive in the spin-off of Bell Labs into Lucent Technologies, is now running for the Senate against Democrat Barbara Boxer in California.

Here’s what Fortune wrote about Fiorina in 1998, naming her the “Most Powerful Woman in Business”:

To anyone with a sense of traditional career paths, Carly Fiorina’s chance of becoming the most powerful woman in American business would have seemed about as good as, well, a guy’s. In college, where she majored in medieval history and philosophy, she was impractical and unfocused. In law school she was restless, and she dropped out her first year. Job to job — receptionist, teacher — she floated. And when she finally went to AT&T as a sales rep in 1980, she refused to join the savings plan because, she said, no way would she stay past two years.
Fast-forward two decades to 1996. Fiorina is a star in nothing less than the hottest, most important industry in American business: telecommunications. Without it, or the products her company produces, few of us could do our jobs. When AT&T decided to spin off Western Electric and Bell Labs into a new company, Fiorina got plucked from a sea of senior men to direct the strategy, orchestrate the IPO, and lead the search for a name and a corporate image. She did well. When it went public that April, Lucent Technologies’ $3 billion offering turned out to be the biggest, most successful IPO in U.S. history. Now, two promotions later, Fiorina is president of Lucent’s core division, generating some $19 billion in revenues this year.

Since the Obama administration argues that the Bell Labs model is crucial to America’s energy future, it should be obvious that the president thinks Carly Fiorina should be the next Senator from the great state of California.