“Our founders never intended us to have a professional political class,” Fiorina says, turning to the camera.

Virtually every elected president in American history — not counting the occasional military hero — made his way to the top by getting elected to other offices first. There are a couple of exceptions who just served in the cabinet, like Herbert Hoover. We can all look forward to hearing a candidate vow to return us to the golden days of the Hoover administration.

Fiorina’s answer is to go back to men like Thomas Jefferson (state legislator, governor, diplomat, secretary of state, vice president), who she says believed strictly in “citizen government.” The founders may not have liked the idea of a political class, but they picked presidents who were part of one. Public men, whose experience in private enterprise frequently involved running a plantation into the ground.

Fiorina, whose tenure at Hewlett-Packard included a controversial merger deal and the layoff of about 30,000 employees, is actually an excellent example of why we don’t want the country to be run like a business. The American people aren’t just shareholders. They would like their government to be efficient, and they would like the budget to balance. But they also want a lot of other stuff — protection from evildoers, compassion for the needy, assistance in retirement, highways without potholes, good schools, a healthy environment.

Who gets what first is a political question. One that preferably would be resolved without having any internal crises so exciting that the chief executive gets tossed out of office.

People who run for president boasting that they aren’t politicians are frequently just trying to compensate for a lack of political skill. Carson (who presumably wants to run government like an operating room) is going to appeal to the folks who think the military is plotting to take over Texas, but otherwise, his only political gift seems to be for making outrageous statements. Fiorina ran for the Senate in 2010 and was beaten by Barbara Boxer, who was thought to be a vulnerable incumbent until Fiorina got hold of her, racking up a grand total of 42 percent of the vote.

On the plus side, Fiorina’s campaign produced one of the all-time great attack videos, in which her more moderate primary opponent was depicted as a Demon Sheep, portrayed by a man crawling across the grass with what looked like a wooly rug over his back and a piece of cardboard on his face. After that it was downhill all the way.

If you’re shopping for candidates with no experience in the business they want to lead, I’d say at least go for the one with the Demon. But really, there are smarter buys.