Takeaway from Jeffrey Sonnenfeld on Carly: She needs to go full Claire Underwood

In the third season of the Netflix political thriller House of Cards, viewers were treated to a foreshadowing of what to expect next season. One of the dilemmas the writers have had to navigate is how to make its ultra-Machiavellian protagonist, Frank Underwood, sympathetic despite the fact that he’s done such things as kill a fellow politician and shove a journalist in front of an oncoming train. (Granted this makes some conservatives love him already but this is beside the point.) Enter Frank’s wife, Claire Underwood, the Machiavellian with a heart. The Machiavellian with a heart is a favorite archetype of liberals going back to at least Joe Klein’s 1990’s book Primary Colors. It grew in the public imagination as a common driving trope in Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing and now inhabits the dark universe of House of Cards in the person of Claire.

Claire is the most Machiavellian-with-a-heart-ish Machiavellian with a heart in the entire TV history of the archetype.  In the first two seasons she was right beside her husband giving him sage council with every maneuver and counter-maneuver supporting him fully even as the body count started with his first two victims. But in season two something happened to Claire, she joined the Russian gay liberation cause. In the midst of a press conference intended to announce a reset with the Russians, Claire’s usually reliable Machiavellian resolution buckled when her conscience could no longer toe the line and gave a long emotional monologue expressing outrage on behalf of the oppressed minority dramatized in season three.

For conservatives this is all boilerplate of course. Right about the time people were binge watching House of Cards Season Three, Putin was running tanks into the Crimea, suggesting that perhaps show writer Mr. Willimon has managed to miss the bigger geo-political picture when it comes to the dangers of Putin’s Russia. But in the symbology of liberal Hollywood writers, Claire’s sudden shift represents the most significant redemptive moment imaginable. The ensuing seasons promise to be about whether Claire and Frank will be able to grow as flourishing liberal beings and learn how to use their evil for the Greater Good.

I bring this up because Carly Fiorina’s nemesis Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, an academic from Yale whose name was invoked by Trump against Carly during last week’s debate, has entered the fray again in a recent article in Politico. Sonnenfeld’s article reveals there’s a lot more going on in this rivalry with Carly than strictly dispassionate academic analysis. It’s obvious there is no love lost between the two. But Sonnenfeld makes a very important point about Carly that her great failure as a leader isn’t that she failed at HP, but that she refuses to acknowledge her mistakes openly so that she can at least learn from them and become a better leader.

While I suspect this rivalry is probably too personal at this point to turn Sonnenfeld himself, the Yale academic has given Carly an excellent suggestion on how she can go full Claire Underwood in the eyes of the public.

“Perhaps Sonnenfeld is right”, Carly might say.

“Perhaps I need to acknowledge that I made serious mistakes while at HP that hurt so many people”

“Perhaps I should confess this in an interview with Barbara Walters.”

“Perhaps it’s time for the public to see a side of Carly that they haven’t yet seen.”

They saw Carly the Righteous Fighter (aka Fiorina of Tarth) but have they seen Carly Underwood? The Machiavellian with a heart who promises to use her Sun Tsu skills for the Greater Good of America?

Readers in this series on Our Neil-Postmanian Political Theater, may wonder about the point of invoking pop-cultural archetypes in my discussion of political current events. A fundamental premise of this series is that our political discourse has now devolved into emotivist theater made up of a vocabulary drawing primarily from popular culture. Popular characters are popular because they manage to crystallize a set of personal features that appeal to a broad cross section of the American audience. This means that TV and cinema offers us a convenient short-hand for types of persona’s that can appeal successfully to the public.

In my last article in this series I mentioned Carly had demonstrated the ability to embody certain limited modes of empathy particularly the militantly righteous mode. What the country now needs to see is another very important mode, the vulnerable confessional mode.

An important guiding principle in this use of archetypes is the understanding that the best candidates have a group of personas that they can utilize as the circumstances require. Obama has been incredibly successful sliding back and forth from Hipster Young Professor to Martin Luther King-ian, making him a very difficult target for political adversaries. Carly needs to develop a similarly potent matrix of personas to resonate between, and vulnerability is a key mode she will need to embody.

And her greatest nemesis may have shown her the way.