Seeking to shore up the female vote, and win over supporters of Hillary Clinton's failed bid for the US presidency, john mccain has turned to forrmer Hewlett-Packard chief Carly Fiorina. Once the most powerful businesswoman in America, Fiorina is senior adviser to McCain's presidential campaign, and chairwoman of the Republican National Committee's Victory Fund. She is also McCain's top economic adviser, an extraordinary achievement for someone who pushed their company into a disastrous takeover that ended up halving the share price and costing her job.

Fiorina is regarded as absolutely critical for getting the female vote. But it's a big gamble to appoint someone who mismanaged one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated companies.

"What a blind spot this is in the McCain campaign to have elevated her stature and centrality in this way. You couldn't pick a worse, non-imprisoned CEO to be your standard-bearer," Yale School of Management's Jeffery Sonnenfeld told the New York Times.

Fiorina's weakness was strategy. She lost her job because of that. But her biggest strength has always been marketing. And as Portfolio.com's Matthew Cooper writes, that's what she brings to the McCain campaign.

"It's all part of the comeback Fiorina has been trying to orchestrate since she was pushed out of H.P. After her tumultuous tenure, she left the company as damaged goods, but one thing was always clear: She was superb at marketing-especially at marketing herself. She put herself in a company TV ad and appeared on numerous magazine covers, garnering many flattering profiles while her company was flailing. (During her five and a half years at H.P., she was on the cover of Forbes, Fortune, or BusinessWeek at least 10 times.) Now she's taking those same skills and using them, to McCain's advantage, to make the Republican Party palatable outside the grumpy-white-male demographic, which happens to be precisely what the GOP needs."