Well, it’s official. Carly Fiorina announced last week that she is entering the Senate race in California against Democrat Barbara Boxer.

And — proving that Tea Baggers learned nothing from the debacle they created in last week’s special election in New York, when they drove a liberal Republican out of the race and thus handed the seat to a Democrat for the first time in over 140 years — Fiorina now has a Tea Bagger opponent in the primary election next June.

It gets better. Assemblyman Chuck DeVore is not just a run-of-the-mill Tea Bagger — he is a real whack job with ties to the Birther movement.

Even if Fiorina defeats DeVore in the primary, her chances of beating Boxer next year are, at the risk of understatement, a long shot. That said, she’s a shoo-in compared with DeVore’s chances against Boxer, which range from nil and nada to zippo and zilch.

Fiorina’s chief problem is her record. She’s known nationally and in California mainly for two things:

• She was the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Hewlett-Packard, where she was a vocal advocate of shipping American jobs overseas. She was forced out in 2005 after she merged HP with computer giant Compaq mainly because HP’s stock had dropped over 50 percent during her four-year tenure. After her departure, it was discovered that in an effort to stop board-room leaks she had eavesdropped on board members. In April 2009, Portfolio magazine listed her as one of the 20 worst CEOs of all time.
• After briefly being considered for John McCain’s running mate last year, her performance as a surrogate was so gaffe-ridden that the campaign sidelined her. (Wanna bet they wished they could have handled the actual VP pick the same way?)

The foolishness of DeVore’s gambit is compounded by the fact that it’s not just prospectively a repeat of the NY23 debacle last week, it’s eerily similar to the primary race for California governor in 2002, when right-winger Bill Simon, whose single claim to fame was the fact that his father had been Pres. Nixon’s Treasury Secretary three decades earlie, defeated liberal Republican Richard Riordan, the former mayor of Los Angeles. In the general, Simon lost to the unpopular incumbent, Gray Davis, by 5 percentage points.

The minefield for Fiorina is that registered Republicans 30 percent or so of the California electorate. As is true just about everywhere, that the 30 percent is comprised mostly of right wingers who are likely to agree with DeVore’s Tea Bagger extremism than Fiorini’s Guiliani-esque positions on social issues.

And then there’s the fact that Boxer is not unpopular. Last time out, in 2004, she collected the third highest number of raw votes of any candidate in the country next to the presidential candidates, George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Boxer remains popular among the state’s liberal base and not particularly unpopular among left-leaning and centrist independents, and so will probably do as well or better in November 2010 as she did six years ago.