(Business 2.0) – On a stultifying, sub-Saharan summer morning in New York, I schlepp across town to see Carly Fiorina--or, more precisely, to see the Carly Fiorina Show. The CEO of Hewlett-Packard has traveled across the country to preside over a splashy coming-out party for an array of shiny new HP hardware, more than 150 virgin products in all. At precisely 9 a.m., she strides briskly to the stage, wearing a smart patterned suit and enough bling-bling to give Missy Elliott a run for her money. For the next half-hour, Fiorina holds forth, confident without being cocky, optimistic but not Panglossian, firmly in command (as Silicon Valleyites so rarely are) of a language that fully qualifies as English. She even snaps off a few decent jokes. After declaring the event to be "the largest launch in the company's history," she adds, "We have almost as many new products as there are gubernatorial candidates in the California recall."

As Fiorina uncorks her well-rehearsed spiel, it strikes me that the label she's often stuck with doesn't really capture her brand of charisma. Unlike Steve Jobs, Fiorina isn't a "rock-star CEO." Instead, she's the consummate politico CEO--the chief executive as capitalist candidate. Surrounded by handlers, relentlessly on-message, she's constantly courting key constituents (Wall Street, the press), making grand promises she only sometimes keeps, and spinning lofty visions of the future and its wonders. Indeed, her rise to the top of two cutthroat industries--first telecom, then computing--was fueled by a succession of hard-fought campaigns, the most dramatic of which climaxed early last year: the bruising proxy battle with Walter Hewlett over HP's $19 billion takeover of Compaq.

That victory was sweet for Fiorina, but since then she's been forced to confront an iron law of politics: Campaigning is one thing, governing quite another. While the Compaq merger isn't likely to be the abject disaster some critics predicted, it's also quickly becoming obvious that it won't cure all that ails HP. And while Fiorina has shown herself to be a brilliant corporate pol, what she hasn't done (yet) is proven herself to be an equally brilliant CEO.

Which of those roles matters more to Fiorina depends entirely on her long-term game plan. If running HP were her be-all and end-all, the final crowning glory to a stellar career, then becoming a Grade A, sleeves-rolled-up, down-in-the-trenches, high-tech turnaround CEO--Lou Gerstner in a skirt--would surely be the only option. Yet as far as I can tell, there's not a single soul in Silicon Valley, and certainly no serious Carly-watcher, who thinks HP is Fiorina's last stand. In fact, from the moment she arrived in 1999, there's been a constant thrum of speculation that she nurtures aspirations to run for public office. Carly for Governor? Carly for Senator? Given the current abysmal standing of CEOs, the notion of Citizen Carly sounds implausible--but all I can say is, I wouldn't put it past her. Her personal ambition is limitless and palpable.

Politics, as it happens, is in her blood. Her father, Joseph Sneed, was a conservative Republican lawyer appointed by Richard Nixon to the federal bench. (This may help explain why Fiorina seems so thoroughly at ease hobnobbing with George W. Bush and his high-level adjutants.) What the daughter seems to have inherited from her dad is a set of political instincts and aptitudes--discipline, stamina, a knack for spin and for the art of the possible--that served her unfailingly at every pivotal moment in her meteoric ascent in the corporate world.

There was her starring role, as a relatively unknown sales executive, in the legendary 1996 Lucent public offering (an IPO road show being the closest approximation that capitalism offers to being on the hustings). There was her selection as HP's new CEO over a pair of heavyweight contenders, Sun's then-president Ed Zander and Intel's current president Paul Otellini. And then, of course, there was Walter Hewlett. "The Hewlett thing let Carly do what she does best--run a campaign," says George Anders, author of the definitive book on the subject, Perfect Enough. "She cast herself as the candidate of the future and Hewlett as the candidate of the past. A classic political strategy, executed flawlessly."

Among Fiorina's critics in the Valley, however, it was widely assumed that the Compaq takeover would be her Waterloo. I must admit, I kinda thought this too. The argument was simple: Putting together two struggling hardware outfits would not a high-tech dynamo make. As Fiorina labored to integrate the companies, IBM, Dell, and Sun would eat her lunch.

But Fiorina and HP got lucky on several fronts. For one thing, Sun imploded. And for another, the overall economy remained stuck in the doldrums, with spending on tech a leading casualty. Now, that might not seem a piece of good fortune. Yet it turns out that a recession can work to your distinct advantage--if what you really need is some quiet time to hunker down and get your house in order. And this, in fact, is precisely what HP did, cutting a staggering 17,000 jobs and $3.5 billion in annual costs in the first full year after the acquisition.

So the Compaq merger--which Fiorina says is now essentially complete--hasn't led to ruin for Hewlett-Packard. But neither has it fundamentally transformed the company. For evidence, look at HP's latest quarterly earnings. (So dispiriting were these numbers that HP's stock fell by more than 10 percent.) Its PC business is still unprofitable. Its enterprise computing business is even further in the red. Its services business, though modestly in the black, is dwarfed in every way by that of IBM, whose software offerings also put HP's to shame. The only true bright spot is its vaunted printer business, which provides roughly a third of HP's sales and fully three-quarters of its operating profit.

What the Compaq deal has done for HP is give it prodigious size and scale. At the New York product launch, Fiorina claimed that HP is "the leading consumer digital hardware company in the world," its gadgets occupying more than 10 percent of total global retail shelf space. In any consolidating industry, size and scale are genuine assets. And with each passing day, Sun's Scott McNealy seems increasingly prescient in his long-ago prediction that high-tech would wind up looking like the auto industry, dominated by its own Big Three. By taking over Compaq, Fiorina substantially increased the odds that HP will be among the surviving trio. What she didn't do was alter the fact that HP is a bone-deep hardware company--and that the future of the hardware business promises to be nasty, brutish, and boring.

All of which brings us back to Fiorina's career path. Pretend for a moment that you are Carly. On the one hand, you decide that HP will be your ultimate legacy. So you dig in, you bear down, you prepare for countless years of grinding competition--first and foremost with IBM (General Motors), secondarily with Dell (to see which company gets to be Ford and which is stuck being Chrysler) and possibly Sun (American Motors, I suppose).

On the other hand, you're only 49. There's still plenty of time for another great adventure. You decide that HP is primarily a vehicle, a platform from which to launch your next incarnation. (Witnessing her keynotes, there's already a certain inescapable sense that she's selling herself as much as she's selling the firm.) You stick it out for another few years, just long enough for the inevitable high-tech rebound, which allows HP to put up some healthy numbers. You declare that you've saved a Silicon Valley institution, you hang up your hat, and you start running for...something.

If you ask me, the decision may have already been made. At a recent event in Santa Clara, Calif., the longtime technology journalist Louise Kehoe put the question directly to Fiorina: Does she have a hankering for high elected office? After mouthing the requisite platitudes about how running HP is a "great privilege," Fiorina coughed up this: "Oh, you know, anything might happen...Never say never in life."

Really, could the answer be any clearer? Carly in 2012. You read it here first.

John Heilemann's next book, "The Valley," will be published by HarperCollins in 2004.