There have been successful and unsuccesful campaign launches on display over the past few years.  You had Obama’s enormously successful speech in Springfield. On the minus side, well, let’s not rub it in.

Anyway, Carly Fiorina officially launched her exploratory campaign yesterday, and let’s just say that she was met with a slew of questions you generally don’t want to get at the start of the campaign. Let’s start with Carla Marinucci’s Citizenship Test:

Critics suggest maybe not, considering that Fiorina, 54, who has a spotty voting California voting record, never cast a ballot in two other states where she lived previously, according to public records.

Officials in Morris County, N.J., said records show she registered to vote there in 1997 but did not vote in a single election and was dropped from the voter rolls in 2005 as inactive.

Before that, Fiorina lived in Montgomery County, Md., where the registrar’s office said they reviewed state databases and found no listing of Fiorina’s voter registration.

Fiorina strongly disputes the voting records as “just wrong,” her spokeswoman, Beth Miller, said. Miller said Tuesday that Fiorina has no records to prove her past voting record and has acknowledged her failure to vote in some elections. But while “she didn’t vote all the time … she did vote,” the spokeswoman added. (SF Chronicle 8/19/09)

As I said, questions from a major newspaper reporter about whether you voted in the past are really not the way you want to start a campaign. From the word go, her spokesman is on the defensive about just exactly why she wants to win this gig.  After all, this really goes to the heart of the race. If you really care so much about the future of the nation, why not bother to at least vote?

And over at the LA Times, the quick blurb about her candidacy was finished with the following:

Her personal wealth would make Fiorina a heavy favorite for the Republican nomination. But she would have a tough fight to unseat Boxer, a Democrat seeking a fourth term. And Fiorina is opposed to abortion, which puts her at odds with most California voters.

Fiorina was fired from Hewlett-Packard after a rocky tenure. (LA Times 8/19/09)

Ouch. Now, if you were starting off a campaign, and that’s the close of the story on you, basically calling you a failure, you’d have to consider that a flop. Poor Carly.

I’d call that a resounding “wah-wha.” (P.s. I love the internet. I found the sound from Super Mario brothers in like 4 seconds.)