“I don’t think John McCain could run a major corporation. I don’t think Barack Obama could run a major corporation. I don’t think Joe Biden could, either. But it is not the same as being the president or vice president of the United States. It is a fallacy to suggest that the country is like a company. To run a business, you have to have a lifetime of experience in business, but that’s not what Sarah Palin, John McCain, Barack Obama or Joe Biden are doing.”

– Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina

Her dreams of heading up the World Bank dashed, former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina, the architect of one of the worst tech mergers in history, has turned her attention to the U.S. Senate.

After months of speculation, Fiorina officially announced her candidacy today. She’ll run as a Republican against Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.). Of course, to do that, she must first win the Republican primary. Fiorina broke the news in an op-ed in the Orange County Register.

“Admittedly, I have not always been engaged in the electoral process, and I should have been,” she wrote. “For many years I felt disconnected from the decisions made in Washington and, to be honest, really didn’t think my vote mattered because I didn’t have a direct line of sight from my vote to a result. I realize that thinking was wrong.”

Reflecting on her personal history, Fiorina continues: “As I grew throughout my career, beginning as a secretary and eventually becoming a CEO, I saw how government impacted business. I learned more as a member of advisory boards at the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA. I now understand, in a very real way, that the decisions made by the Senate impact every family and every business, of any size, in America. This is what motivates me to run for the U.S. Senate. And so today I am announcing my candidacy to serve the people of California as your next U.S. senator….Together we can turn things around.”

Together we can turn things around? Not if Fiorina’s performance at HP is any indication. Before she was forced out of the company by its board of directors, she was so at odds with the uniquely Californian “HP Way” that her corner office could have been powered solely by Bill Hewlett spinning in his grave.

UPDATE: Here’s another Fiorina op-ed from earlier this year in which she discusses executive pay. Unsurprisingly, she is against President Obama’s efforts to restore “common sense” to CEO compensation. And why wouldn’t she be? After all, she walked away from HP with a $21 million severance package.

UPDATE: For those of you just joining us over at CNet, the headline is a joke referring to HP’s ill-starred merger with Compaq.

“People familiar with the situation” tell The Wall Street Journal that the plan under consideration would combine HP’s printer and PC businesses under Todd Bradley, who currently oversees only the latter. It’s not yet clear what such a move will mean for Vyomesh Joshi, who heads up HP’s Imaging and Printing Group. Presumably, the company will keep him around. Under his leadership, HP’s printer business generated more than 30 percent of the company’s total profits during its last quarter.

In any event, should the plan be approved (and it is contingent on Hurd’s approval), it will bring HP back full circle to 2005 when then-CEO Carly Fiorina merged HP’s printer division with its struggling PC division. Except now that printer growth has slowed, it’s the PC business that’s the powerhouse.

Tough choices, *cough*, eh Mark?

I don’t think John McCain could run a major corporation. I don’t think Barack Obama could run a major corporation. I don’t think Joe Biden could, either. But it is not the same as being the president or vice president of the United States. It is a fallacy to suggest that the country is like a company. To run a business, you have to have a lifetime of experience in business, but that’s not what Sarah Palin, John McCain, Barack Obama or Joe Biden are doing.”

– Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina says Sarah Palin’s not the only politician unqualified to lead HP

Thankfully, it wasn’t nearly so rancorous.

Valued at $13.9 billion when it was first announced, the deal will more than double the size of HP’s consulting and outsourcing business. It will likely do the same to the $16.6 billion in revenue from services the company made in 2007.

When the dust has settled around the merger, HP will be the second-largest provider of consulting and outsourcing services, behind IBM (IBM). But it will take some doing to get there. “It’s a very significant combination,” Gartner’s (IT) Ben Pring said when the deal was announced back in May. “[But] people who are skeptical of big integrations will have a field day around this. It’s putting together two large businesses with two different heritages. It’s going to be a big culture clash.”

And if HP manages to pull it off? Well, as Fiorina would likely tell you, bigger is better if you can do it right.

“It’s somewhat amusing because we’ve seen this play before. I think this is sort of further evidence that HP really does see value at scale basically, at size,” Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said in May. “One of the things we’ve seen very clearly over the last couple years is that Carly really had the right idea, she just couldn’t execute on it. She wasn’t wrong for saying HP needed to be bigger, effectively,” said Haff. “If (the merger) does go through we’re going to end up with an HP that looks a lot like Carly wanted it to look.”

Michael was moody and inconsistent. He could agree to something on one day and object strenuously the next. … He could be charming and focused. He could be depressed and disengaged. He could be rude and abusive.

“… I told H-P’s board in midsummer [2001] that our biggest problem with integration would be Michael. I said that I would work hard to make him successful, but that we’d need to be prepared to move him out of the company within a year.

“… I concluded one of those conversations by saying ‘Michael is like the little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When he’s good, he’s very, very good, and when he’s bad, he’s horrid.’ “

–Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina on former Compaq Chief Executive Michael Capellas in her book, “Tough Choices”

If First Data’s board of directors owns a copy of Fiorina’s memoir, they clearly don’t lend much credence to her withering assessment of Michael Capellas. Because this morning, the Denver-based transaction processor said it will name him as CEO following completion of the acquisition of the company by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. Capellas will succeed Henry “Ric” Duques, who came back to the company in 2005 to oversee its reorganization.

Sharp guy, Capellas. When he left H-P in 2002, he received $14.4 million in severance, plus a $1.9 million incentive payment and $9.6 million to cover his taxes on the payments. When he took over at MCI, he nabbed a $2 million signing bonus. And when he left, he trousered a $39.2 million payout–$11.3 million for three years’ worth of salary and bonus; $18.5 million from a previously disclosed restricted stock grant; and $9.4 million in payments to cover the taxes on his exit package, according to an MCI proxy statement.

As ZDNet’s Larry Dignan notes, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to chart Capellas’s next moves. They’ll look like this:

• Capellas becomes CEO at First Data and gets hooked up with a sweet compensation package (there are no griping shareholders in private equity);
• First Data goes public again (after all, that’s how KKR will cash out);
• Capellas stays as CEO and perhaps sells First Data to another firm.

Sounds like a plan. All that’s missing is a step in which he pens the 3,390-word memo about how he’s going to “transform [First Data], and do it over the next 180 days.”