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Some political candidates are great at throwing around snappy one-liners. Donald Trump has an incredible facility with sound bites. They rarely have a passing connection to reality, and often don’t even make sense, but they land well with his audiences. He knows he can just yell, “Let’s build a wall!” and his crowds will go crazy.

Then there are candidates who are incredibly bad at this dark art, like Carly Fiorina.

Mrs. Fiorina was on the debate stage on Thursday night, taking her well-deserved position at the Republican children’s table. Lacking anything of substance to say, she decided to insult Hillary Clinton’s marriage. “Unlike another woman in this race, I actually love spending time with my husband,” she said.

Dragging the Clintons’ relationship onto the public stage (as Mr. Trump also has done) does not even rise to the level of schoolyard taunts and, of course, Mrs. Fiorina does not have the slightest clue how Mrs. Clinton feels about being with her husband. But little things like the truth have never bothered the former printer company executive, who earlier in the campaign lied about Planned Parenthood and then repeated the lie day after day.

After her debate comments, Mrs. Fiorina followed up on CNN with a fusillade of canned insults. “Hillary Clinton has spent her entire life on a quest for power,” said Mrs. Fiorina, who rose from a management trainee position to high-profile jobs at AT&T, then Lucent, then Hewlett Packard without any desire for power.

Mrs. Clinton, said Mrs. Fiorina, “has avoided prosecution more times than El Chapo.”

Mrs. Clinton has never faced prosecution, but the undaunted Mrs. Fiorina leered into the camera and added: “Once again, she wants to be in the White House. The truth is she is more qualified for ‘the Big House.’”

Get it? White House? Big House?

Observing Mrs. Fiorina’s campaign is like watching one of those comedies in which the sad, geeky character desperate to get in with the cool kids says things that make you cringe. The big difference is that Mrs. Fiorina lacks the evident core of vulnerability, and sincerity, that makes you like the geeky character. There is nothing sweet about Mrs. Fiorina. She’s just sad.