Sometimes, when I'm watching Carly Fiorina during her presidential bid, I ask myself if I'm in an alternate universe.

Fiorina — widely regarded in Silicon Valley as one of the worst tech CEOs of all-time — seems to be not just running on her past disastrous tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, but to convince the public that this record is good enough to make her a contender for President.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Fiorina's time at HP was an unmitigated disaster that helped propel HP, one of the most iconic companies in American history, into a tailspin.

It's important to focus on the realities behind Fiorina's tenure as CEO. They don't hold up as her campaign speeches would have one believe.

Layoffs and faulty strategy

Fiorina likes to pretend that the reason HP faltered so much is because of the struggling tech economy after 9/11 and the dot-com bust, but that's not really true.

Fiorina left Hewlett-Packard amid well-chronicled failures. A February 2005 Fortune cover story on Fiorina (which hit newsstands just days before her ouster by the HP board of directors) detailed the problems well.

During her time as CEO, HP lost more than half of its value and the company laid off 30,000 employees in the United States. Fiorina also famously presided over the $19 billion merger with Compaq in 2001, a merger that tallies among the worst in corporate history for its damage to the company's strategy, its mistaken bet on personal computers at the expense of big business, and the thousands of jobs that Fiorina cut in the name of "shareholder value." HP lost competitive ground, struggling to make money and reporting disappointing earnings at a much higher rate than its contemporaries at Dell and IBM.

Carly Fiorina speaking in Des Moines, Iowa in January, months before officially announcing her bid for the GOP nomination. Image: Charlie Neibergall, File/Associated Press

The merger

Hewlett-Packard's merger with Compaq is one that had a high ambition: to make HP the biggest and best information technology company in the world.

It failed.

Instead, at HP, Fiorina doubled down on the consumer PC market, ignoring some of the greater trends towards the cloud —which would come to dominate computing - and the enterprise business, which served major corporations with lucrative, long-running contracts. (After years of flailing by the company, Fiorina's successor, Mark Hurd, would change strategies to focus more on the enterprise and on cloud computing and this proved to be successful.)

This was a mistake that Fiorina could have easily avoided. There was no more disastrous decision HP could make than to fall in love with personal computers in 2002.

In 2002, Compaq and HP were both battling in the PC arms race against Dell. Dell was on a tear at the time, undercutting and out-selling its competitors. Compaq, a company that had once been the number one PC maker, was already on the downswing when HP bought it, losing its crown to Dell in 2001.

Dell had more direct-sales channels than either HP or Compaq, able to go directly to consumers in a prescient foreshadowing of the future of internet commerce. At the same time, both Compaq and HP were starting to get hurt on high-end server sales, thanks to increased competition (also from Dell), as well as a market downturn after the dot-com bust.

Fiorina saw a combination of the two companies as a way to take on Dell and grow revenues to match IBM. Fiorina led the fight to acquire Compaq.

Along the way she made strong enemies, fighting Walter Hewlett (son of HP co-founder Bill Hewlett) in a bitter proxy war over the merger. Hewlett wasn't convinced the merger was a good idea, seeing doubling-down on the PC market as a risky, especially when it was a low-margin business. Hewlett also argued that a focus on PCs would dilute imaging and printers — two areas where HP was not only leading, but had good profit margins.

Carly Fiorina campaigning in Clear Lake, Iowa in August. Image: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

It wasn't just the Hewlett family that was against the merger; Deutsche Bank, which held a huge number of HP shares, originally voted against the merger in the proxy vote. As recounted by Fortune, Fiorina played hardball to convince Deutsche Bank to change its mind, apparently threatening to pull HP's business from the uncooperative bank:

Enraged, Fiorina threatened in a recorded voicemail, "we may have to do something extraordinary" to bring Deutsche Bank over the line. In a conference call with Deutsche Bank commercial bankers eager to do business with HP, she stated "This is obviously of great importance to us as a company. It is of great importance to our ongoing relationship." After such coercion, Deutsche Bank's commercial bankers intervened; apparently fearing lost business then, supposedly independent Deutsche Bank fund managers reversed their vote. This was immediately challenged in Delaware Chancery Court. The court saw the danger of such alleged vote-buying, but ultimately it allowed the deal.

Fiorina won the battle for Compaq, but it was a pyrrhic victory: HP, with Compaq in tow, became the largest PC maker in the world — but it was a leader in a business in which it was difficult to turn a decent profit.

By embracing PCs, HP also lost ground in a business it had dominated before the merger: printers. By moving away from the high-margin printer market into the low-margin PC market, HP got itself into a situation that took three more CEOs to figure out.

The damage this strategy wreaked was clear in HP's financial statements.

In its 2002 proxy statement, HP projected profit margins for its enterprise software system to be at 9.2% in fiscal 2003. After the merger, the actual profit margin was 1%.

The proxy projected 3% margins on PCs in fiscal 2003, it actually came to just 0.1%.

And in the margin-heavy services business? HP in its proxy expected a margin of 13.7%. It wound up at 11% in 2003 and then fell to 9.2% in fiscal 2004.

In short, HP, merged with Compaq, failed to meet any of its own expectations.

Again, revenue may have been up — that tends to happen when you buy a company that is pulling in $40 billion in revenue on its own each year — but the actual math wasn't working because the value of the company was stagnant or falling.

Fiorina in Iowa this month. Image: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

More than that, by focusing on Compaq, Fiorina would put HP on a path to chasing the lowest common denominator, the cheap, easily copied product that would never distinguish the company.

Just as Fiorina was trying to imitate IBM by going whole hog on personal computers, IBM was getting ready to sell of its PC business. It realized, as Walter Hewlett did, that focusing so much on the low-margin PC business wasn't worth it. Competing against Dell wasn't a game it wanted to play.

A decade later, as the PC industry has continued to collapse, IBM looks all the smarter for getting out when it did. HP? Not so much.

Yet Fiorina remains resolute that merging with Compaq "was absolutely the right move for the business." In a recent interview with Neil Cavuto on Fox Business, Fiorina champions her key talking points regarding the merger.

First, Fiorina notes that the revenues for HP doubled (see below for a better look at those figures) and she argues that HP accelerated its growth and notes that it increased its innovation — by which she means its number of patents filed.

Fiorina did make one point to Cavuto that is worth repeating: "Some of our number one competitors when I arrived, like Sun Microsystems, just don't exist anymore." It's true. A number of large competitors in the enterprise and PC space from the early 2000s are gone. In fact, it's almost indisputable that if HP hadn't acquired Compaq, Compaq would be gone.

But HP? That would have probably been one of the companies that survived. The criticism Fiorina faced in 2002 and 2003 and still faces now, is that HP wasn't at such risk that saving it necessitated a $24.5 billion acquisition.

Not only that, but the cost of Compaq would haunt HP for more than a decade. In Oct. 2014, current CEO Meg Whitman officially announced that HP was spinning-off its PC and printer division away from its enterprise services division.

In fairness to Fiorina, she was likely not HP's worst CEO ever. That honor probably belongs to Leo Apotheker, an executive famous for killing off webOS and spending $10 billion on magic beans.

But make no mistake. Just because Apotheker was worse doesn't mean Fiorina's tenure wasn't mired with problems or that the merger was a good idea.

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina talks with Kelsey Bayliss, of Altoona, Iowa, as she holds her nine-month old son Bristen during a meet and greet at Cecil's Cafe, Thursday, July 23, 2015, in Marshalltown, Iowa. Image: Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

Fiorina's management style

It's telling that so far, few former HP employees have contributed to Fiorina's presidential campaign. The CEO was famously unpopular with those outside of her own hand-picked staff.

Fiorina enraged some longtime HP employees early on by putting a photo of herself in the HP lobby alongside founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. She also put images of herself in some of the promotional materials for her "HP invent" ad campaign.

"She wanted to reinvent her company pretty much in her own image and she was directly involved in creating the new HP image, which featured her as a physical prop," HP veteran Roy Verley told CNN in February.

One high-ranking former HP senior vice president I spoke with (who didn't want to be named), visibly shuddered when I brought up Fiorina and her management style, which clashed with the familial culture of HP.

"Working for Carly was a terrible experience, the worst in my professional career," he told me. "She didn't get our culture and she didn't get our company. Then she brought in Compaq, which was full of even more people that didn't get what HP was."

It's notable that when it comes time to defend Fiorina's record on the culture of HP, every single news article her campaign cites is from 1999, within months of her appointment, before her track record had been established.

That her campaign can't find any positive articles about Fiorina's leadership or her impact on employee culture at HP — aside from an op-ed by former Intel chairman Craig Barrett in 2010 — is telling.

A book, a sign and campaign information for Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina sit on a table during a meet and greet at Cecil's Cafe, Thursday, July 23, 2015, in Marshalltown, Iowa. Image: Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

Turning

Fiorina and her campaign team are busy trying to make lemonade out of her sour time at HP.

Yet as Andrew Ross Sorkin points out at The New York Times, those re-writes just don't fit with reality.

Fiorina likes to tout the fact that she doubled HP's revenues to $90 billion from $44 billion after acquiring Compaq. But as Sorkin points out, those are revenue figures, not profit. It's simple math: acquiring a company that's already making good revenues will yield more revenue.

She also fired 30,000 employees. Fiorina likes to try to spin the job numbers, pointing out that HP had 151,000 employees in 2004, versus the 84,800 it had when she joined the company in 1999.

But consider that HP acquired a number of companies — not just Compaq — during her tenure. The reality is that more than 30,000 jobs were lost.

A campaign sign for Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina hangs on a mounted fish during a meet and greet at Cecil's Cafe, Thursday, July 23, 2015, in Marshalltown, Iowa. Image: Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

Still, its telling that Fiorina is so focused on trying to change the narrative regarding her tenure at HP. When it comes to numbers — those can be spun either way. The reality is that HP's profits did drop, even if its revenues grew.

It's also true that HP cut jobs and doubled-down on what turned out to be a business that had already peaked (consumer PCs).

Why does this matter

Who cares how well — or how poorly — Fiorina managed HP?

Well, Fiorina does. Her campaign has decided that her reign at HP is what makes her qualified to be President of the United States.

If Fiorina insists on running on the back of her business record, it's only fair that we admit that ten years later, it was a mess.