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“One Million For Me, None For You”: How Carly Fiorina Screwed Her Campaign Staff And Paid Herself First

After Carly Fiorina’s unsuccessful 2010 run for Senate in California, it took her more than four years to fully pay staff and vendors for their work on her campaign to unseat Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.

But a review of Federal Election Commission records by The Daily Beast shows that Fiorina first paid herself back for more than $1.25 million in personal loans she made to the campaign, including a $1 million check on the day before Election Day. That check set the campaign back so far it was impossible to pay staff and vendors what they were owed for years.

Marty Wilson, Fiorina’s then-campaign manager, said Fiorina knew at the time that there would be debts at the end of the campaign, but that it was difficult to know how deep the debt would be.

“The problem with campaigns is you project debt based on what you think revenues are going to be,” Wilson said. “People say they are going to send money, but Election Day comes and goes, and you’ve lost, and those receivables don’t materialize.”

With more than $1 million out the door at the last minute and a shortfall in fundraising commitments, the campaign ended nearly $500,000 in debt, unable to pay vendors and staff, including Wilson, who was owed more than $60,000.

“We certainly talked to her after the campaign quite a bit about the nature of the debt, who the money was owed to, did some things to get some of the bills paid off after the election,” Wilson said. “Was I frustrated? Yes. But there were other people who were more frustrated than I was.”

The best part? This is totally, 100 percent legal.

Under federal law, self-funding candidates can spend unlimited money on their campaigns. Some donate the money outright, while others, like Fiorina, make loans to the campaign with the hopes of being paid back once the money is raised from other sources.

But the loans are not indefinite. The 2002 McCain-Feingold Act limits the window during which a candidate can be reimbursed for those candidate-sponsored loans, which could explain Fiorina’s haste to get at least some of her money back.

Paul S. Ryan, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C., said the law was supposed to keep lobbyists from paying candidates’ campaign expenses, but it also entices candidates to repay themselves quickly or never be paid back at all.

“The unfortunate thing in this scenario is that a bunch of other vendors and staff were seemingly shafted by this move,” said Ryan. “It’s not illegal, but one may draw their own conclusions about the type of person who would rather pay themselves back a loan, when they are free to spend as much money as they want on their campaign, rather than repay others who they owe money to.”

Even going into the campaign, it was clear the Senate bid would be a wildly expensive proposition for any Republican candidate. Fiorina, a first-time candidate who had made her name, and much of her estimated $120 million personal fortune at that time, as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 until 2005, was no exception.

Although Fiorina’s run at HP was rocky, with more than 30,000 layoffs and a stock that lost more than half its value, Fiorina left with a $21 million payout and more than $20 million more in additional compensation.

Altogether, Fiorina financed nearly $7 million of the $21 million Senate campaign through personal loans to her campaign at 0 percent interest. In November 2009, she launched Carly for California and quickly pumped $2.5 million into the nascent Senate bid. She then repeatedly dipped into her personal fortune as the campaign went on, including a $1 million loan in the final weeks of the campaign to pay for a last-minute ad buy against Boxer.

Having declared all of her loans during the primary as a loss, Fiorina paid herself back in full for loans she made in the general election, using cash on hand to repay herself $250,000 two weeks before the election and $1 million on the day before Election Day.

Over the next four years, the Carly for California campaign pushed its debts back month after month after month, year after year. As Fiorina and her husband relocated to a multimillion-dollar Virginia estate and campaign treasurers came and went, the vendors and staff remained unpaid, including the widow of a close adviser who had died suddenly during her Senate bid.

Only as Fiorina began to publicly consider launching a presidential campaign in 2015 did she pay off her 2010 debts, quietly writing a personal check for $487,410 to finally pay the outstanding bills and close the Carly for California campaign.

Three months later, Carly for President launched, quickly raising $1.4 million for Fiorina’s presidential bid. But unlike Carly for California, the new campaign is making do without her personal fortune. So far, she and her husband, Frank, have given $2,700 each, the maximum allowed for any average donor.

That may be partially explained by Marty Wilson’s observation of Fiorina’s 2010 experience. “I don’t think anybody likes parting with a substantial percentage of their net worth for a speculative venture.”

The Carly for President campaign did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

 

By: Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast, September 25, 2015

September 26, 2015 Posted by | Campaign Financing, Campaign Staffers, Carly Fiorina | , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

“Carly Fiorina Is The New Mitt Romney”: Fiorina Is About To Get Bained, An Assault She May Not Be Able To Withstand

Carly Fiorina has a Mitt Romney problem.

Fiorina, like Romney, is a wealthy former CEO from an affluent Republican family. Like Romney, she entered the Republican presidential contest assuming that her record running a large company would be one of her greatest assets. But she may be about to learn that her opponents have little trouble turning that record into her greatest liability.

Like Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, the private equity firm at which he oversaw the dismantling of numerous companies purchased by Bain, Fiorina’s record at Hewlett-Packard was notable for the number of workers fired on her watch. Romney’s Republican primary opponents, as well as the Obama campaign, attacked Romney’s record at Bain so aggressively that by the end of the 2012 campaign some people were using Bain as a verb: to destroy a wealthy candidate’s public image by attacking their business record.

Fiorina is about to get Bained. And if history is any guide, it’s an assault she may not be able to withstand.

“When you rise as fast as Fiorina has in the last couple weeks, all your opponents, plus the news media, are gonna pay attention to you,” Newt Gingrich, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2012 and acted as one of Romney’s most prolific critics, told me.

“The upside,” he said, “is now you’re more famous. But when you’re more famous, they come after you.”

Fiorina’s opponents have a lot to work with. Like most politicians, she likes to self-mythologize. Born in Texas in 1954, she says she is from “a modest, middle-class family.” She tends to leave out that her father, Joseph Tyree Sneed III, worked at the Justice Department, including as a deputy attorney general, before President Richard Nixon appointed him to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1973.

Fiorina frequently tells of how she rose “from secretary to CEO” in a way that “is only possible in this nation” because it “proves that every one of us has potential.” In fact, she took the secretary job in between dropping out of law school and moving to Italy with her first husband, who last week emerged from obscurity to brand her as cold and calculating. She later went to business school, and after stints at AT&T and Lucent, in 1999 Fiorina became the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, the iconic technology company. She was the first woman in American history to lead a Fortune 100 company.

Her time running Hewlett-Packard was highly controversial. Fiorina deflects criticism of her 5½ years at the helm by noting that the company’s revenue doubled during that time. But, as Bloomberg View’s Justin Fox notes, “that was mainly because she made a gigantic and controversial acquisition.” Fiorina acquired Compaq, a computer manufacturer, for $19 billion in 2002—a move largely received by those within (PDF) and observing HP as unwise. Dell Computer’s Michael Dell called it the “dumbest deal of the decade.” By the time Fiorina was pushed out of HP three years after the Compaq deal, and given a $21 million severance package, HP had laid off 30,000 workers.

Four years later, in the midst of the Great Recession, Fiorina ran for a Senate seat from California. Barbara Boxer, her Democratic opponent, used the HP layoffs and Fiorina’s enormous severance to pillory the former CEO. During a September 2010 debate, Boxer asked if voters really “want to elect someone who made her name as a CEO at Hewlett-Packard, laying thousands and thousands of workers off, shipping their jobs overseas, making no sacrifice while she was doing it, taking $100 million. I don’t think we need those Wall Street values right now.”

Fiorina replied that “when you lead a business, whether it’s a nine-person business or 150,000 people, you sometimes have to make the agonizing choice to lose some jobs to save more.”

Later in the debate, a retired Hewlett-Packard employee named Tom Watson was allowed to ask Fiorina a question. “In a keynote speech in 2004, you said, ‘There’s no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.’ Do you still feel that way? What are your plans to create jobs in California?”

Fiorina didn’t answer directly. She said the loss of American jobs was the fault of the federal government for not incentivizing companies the way that China does with tax holidays and help cutting through regulations. In other words, those 30,000 people were laid off because of Washington, not because of Carly Fiorina.

It didn’t end there. The debate’s host noted that Fiorina had suggested teachers be paid in accordance with their performance. Why then, did Fiorina accept a $21,000,000 severance payment when she was fired from HP? Fiorina’s response wasn’t exactly steely. That was, she explained, what the HP board decided she should get paid.

Boxer needled Fiorina further. “My opponent—we know that she shipped jobs overseas, thousands of them,” she said, “we know that she fired workers, tens of thousands of them.”

Fiorina seemed at a loss for how to defend herself. “I think it’s absolutely a shame that Barbara Boxer would use Hewlett-Packard, a treasure of California, one of the great companies in the world, whose employees work very hard and whose shareholders have benefited greatly from both my time as CEO and all the hard work of the employees, that I had the privilege to lead, I think it’s a shame that she would use that company as a political football,” she said.

A few weeks after the debate, Boxer released an ad titled “Outsourcing,” which slammed Fiorina for the HP layoffs, for “tripling her salary,” buying “a million-dollar yacht” (she has two) for herself and “five corporate jets” for HP. Fiorina’s poll numbers immediately plummeted. In the Democratic wipeout year of 2010, Boxer managed to defeat Fiorina by 10 points.

Fiorina knows similar attacks are coming as she makes a run at the presidency. You could almost see the impending sense of doom on her face during Wednesday night’s Republican debate.

“Ms. Fiorina, you were CEO of Hewlett-Packard,” CNN host Jake Tapper said. “Donald Trump says you, quote, ‘ran HP into the ground,’ you laid off tens of thousands of people, you got viciously fired. For voters looking to somebody with private-sector experience to create American jobs, why should they pick you and not Donald Trump?”

Fiorina’s reply felt lived-in, like she had long ago decided on the proper delivery—almost Carlin-esque, fast-paced and melodic—for such a message. She looked as though she had practiced every syllable and plotted out every point at which she would pause to take a breath.

“I led Hewlett-Packard through a very difficult time,” she said, “the worst technology recession in 25 years.” Despite the circumstances, she said, she led the company to success. She rattled off her supposed accomplishments: “We doubled the size of the company, we quadrupled its top-line growth rate, we quadrupled its cash flow, we tripled its rate of innovation.”

Donald Trump looked on, smirking and rolling his eyes with meme-worthy animation.

“Yes, we had to make tough choices,” she said. But, she said, firing thousands of people actually “saved 80,000 jobs,” which led to the growth of “160,000 jobs.” And how dare Trump of all people make such a criticism, Fiorina said, since “you ran up mountains of debt, as well as losses, using other people’s money and you were forced to file for bankruptcy not once, not twice, four times. A record four times. Why should we trust you to manage the finances of this nation any differently than you managed the finances of your casinos?”

Fiorina’s defense of her time at HP was a minor blip in her debate performance, which saw her bash Trump for his recent attack on her looks and open up about losing her stepdaughter to drug addiction.

She received rave reviews from the media and vaulted up in the polls from 3 percent at the beginning of the month to 14 percent in a CNN/ORC poll released Sunday. Fiorina’s rise coincides with the first signs of Trump’s decline. Though still in the lead, Trump fell from 32 percent to 24 percent in the CNN poll.

Fiorina is, understandably, feeling optimistic. Asked if she would like to speak with me for this story, Fiorina’s deputy campaign manager, Sarah Isgur Flores, emailed, “I’m swamped today. But I’m sure it’ll be good without me :)”

As the emerging candidate of the moment, Fiorina should expect the coming Bain-like attacks on her record will intensify perhaps beyond even what she experienced in 2010. In The Gamble, a data-driven analysis of the 2012 election, political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck argue that although “the polls seemed almost random” in the Republican primary, “there was an underlying logic at work.” That logic, according to Sides and Vavreck, can be described as “discovery, scrutiny, and decline.”

When a candidate does something to capture the public’s attention—getting into the race at all, in the case for Trump, or delivering a breakout debate performance, for Fiorina—the “discovery” of the candidate results in an increase in media attention, which in turn results in a surge in the polls. But with increased attention comes increased scrutiny from both the media and primary opponents and the barrage of negative information reliably results in an “irreversible decline in both news coverage and poll numbers.”

Sides told me that “Fiorina is a textbook case of discovery. For months, her candidacy received limited media attention. Then, thanks to Trump’s comments and last week’s debate, she received much more coverage, and her poll numbers responded accordingly.”

Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich all experienced these cycles in 2012. Only Romney survived. Sides and Vavreck write that Romney had the advantage of a well-run organization and fundraising operation, more support from Republican leaders than other candidates, and the good fortune of being “the most popular candidate among the largest factions in the party, which tend not to be the most conservative factions.”

But the anti-Bain attacks, launched by Gingrich and others during the primary, left Romney vulnerable in the general election. There was an incessant drip-drip of negative information about Romney’s immense personal wealth and his time at Bain Capital released by his Republican rivals that enabled Democrats to latch onto the narrative of Mitt-the-jobs-destroyer so easily.

The most memorable of these assaults came from Winning Our Future, an “independent expenditure-only committee” supporting Gingrich’s campaign that distributed When Mitt Romney Came to Town, a 28-minute attack documentary that felt like a cross between an episode of American Greed and a Michael Moore documentary. The movie accused Romney of everything from “stripping American businesses of assets, selling everything to the highest bidder and often killing jobs for big financial rewards” to “contributing to the greatest American job loss since World War II.” Devastatingly, it featured interviews with real people (some of whom had no idea they were being interviewed for an attack ad against Romney) who described in painstaking detail the misery of losing their jobs as a result of Bain Capital’s actions.

“We thought that it was a legitimate question to raise and also that it was something that Barack Obama was going to raise, which of course he did,” Gingrich told The Daily Beast. “I think it’s the same thing as attacking me for my record as speaker,” he said. Which is to say, Gingrich thinks any candidate’s history is fair game.

“Anybody at this point is going to have a record in their career or they wouldn’t have gotten here. So, it’s fair to go after Trump for his business record. It’s fair to go after Carly for hers. It’s fair to go after Jeb for his governor’s record. If you’re gonna run for president you’d better expect that you’re gonna be thoroughly challenged—and you should be! We give presidents of the United States an enormous amount of power and whoever wins that office should be thoroughly tested.”

Asked how he would run against Fiorina were he in this Republican primary, Gingrich said, “I have no idea. I have been so confused by this primary season so far.”

When it came time for the general election, branding Romney as an out-of-touch, car-elevator-riding bully-of-the-working-class proved an easy task for Democrats. All the work had already been done for them by Gingrich & Co.

Will Fiorina ever make it that far? It’s at best a longshot.

She has all of the downside of being a wealthy and controversial former CEO like Romney, but none of the benefit—the establishment support, the fundraising operation, the organization, or the four years as governor of Massachusetts—that insulated him against the “discovery, scrutiny and decline” pinball machine and helped him win the primary.

“She’s smart, Fiorina knows this is coming and she knows exactly what it’s gonna be like, because she’s already lived through it once,” Gingrich said. “My guess is that she must believe that she has a stronger, more convincing answer than she had in the Senate race in 2010.”

It’s true that Fiorina may now be a better prepared and more polished candidate than she was when she last ran for office, but the substance of her answers to questions about HP hasn’t changed much at all.

But to hear Gingrich tell it, when you’re the longshot who is suddenly surging, that doesn’t really matter. “I’m sure it’s more fun to be one of the top two or three candidates and have to defend yourself than to be in the bottom tier and have nobody paying any attention to you,” he told me.

And isn’t that what a presidential campaign is really about?

 

By: Olivia Nuzzi, The Daily Beast, September 22, 2015

September 24, 2015 Posted by | Carly Fiorina, Donald Trump, GOP Primary Debates | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Without A True Count, There’s Even Less Accountability”: How Many People Are Killed By Police? We’re Only Beginning To Find Out

Amazingly, although people are killed by police virtually every day in the United States, there is no government agency, no bureaucracy, and no database that counts them all. Nor is there any national prayer wall or shrine where images of the dead and their stories are collected in an effort to portray them as individuals.

Last week, almost simultaneously, The Washington Post and The Guardian US unveiled large-scale journalistic projects that tried to supply a comprehensive, independent accounting of citizens killed by police since the beginning of this year. Same story, similar journalistic standards. So far, The Guardian story, with its interactive database linking to photos and stories of the dead, has come closest to filling the shameful gap.

In what Lee Glendinning, the new editor of The Guardian US, called “the most comprehensive public accounting of deadly force in the US,” the site launched “The Counted,” an interactive database of those killed by police since January 1 that includes the names, locations, background, race, means of death—along with, when possible, photos and stories of the dead.

Combining traditional reporting and “verified crowd sourcing,” Glendinning said the idea was to “build on the work on databases already out there,” most of which, she said, “are largely numbers and statistics. We wanted to build on these by telling the stories of these people’s lives, over a whole year, every day, and update them every day.”

Most Americans probably assume that some agency keeps track of the people who have been killed by police, but no such authoritative clearinghouse exists. There are partial counts by various bureaucracies, as well as by organizations like KilledByPolice.net and FatalEncounters.org, but none are complete.

“You could tell me how many people, the absolute number, bought a book on Amazon,” FBI director James Comey himself complained in a speech last month. “It’s ridiculous, I can’t tell you how many people were shot by police in this country last week, last year, the last decade.”

Some of the difficulties in keeping count are due to the reluctance of local police departments to file reports when they kill someone. But, as Tom McCarthy wrote at The Guardian, “The structural and technical challenges to compiling uniform data from the 18,000-plus local law enforcement agencies in the US far exceeds the reporting problem, in some cases.”

Without a true count, there is even less accountability. “A counting is a prerequisite,” Glendinning said, for any kind of “informed public debate about the severity of the problem.”

The Guardian didn’t attempt to determine whether the deaths were justified or unjustified. But they did find some disturbing trends and alarming sloppiness:

  • In the first five months of 2015, 464 people were killed by law enforcement—that’s twice as many as calculated by the US government’s official public records. (The FBI “counted 461 ‘justifiable homicides’ by law enforcement in all of 2013, the latest year for which official data is available.”)
  • Of those 464 killed, 102 people were unarmed.
  • Black Americans are more than twice as likely to be unarmed when killed during encounters with police as white people: “32% of black people killed by police in 2015 were unarmed, as were 25% of Hispanic and Latino people, compared with 15% of white people killed.”
  • Fourteen of the fatalities occurred while the victim was in custody, including the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore.
  • The analysis revealed five people killed by police whose names have not been publicly released before.

A day before the Guardian story broke, The Washington Post came out with similar trends and numbers based on its own in-depth investigation of police-caused fatalities. (“We knew they were working on something, and they knew we were,” Glendinning said, but she believes the timing is coincidence.) One big difference between the two projects is that the Post limits its data to death by police shootings, which, it found, have amounted to 385 so far this year. The Guardian’s 464 police-caused deaths in the same period, however, also include those by Taser (27), vehicle, and other means. Hence, Eric Garner’s death while the NYPD held him in a chokehold wouldn’t be included in the Post tally. (Mother Jones compares some of the two publications’ findings here.)

It was probably the one-two punch of the Post and Guardian investigations that led to an uncharacteristically quick political response. Within 48 hours after the pieces appeared, senators Cory Booker and Barbara Boxer proposed a plan to “force all American law enforcement agencies to report killings by their officers” to the Department of Justice.

Another difference between the two projects is that, while both will collect data through the end of the year, the Post’s database—and any photos, stories and interactive bells and whistles that might accompany it—won’t go public, it said, until “a future date.”

And so in terms of emotional impact, The Guardian has the jump. In fact, “The Counted” reminds me of the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times project, “Portraits of Grief,” which ran more than 1,800 capsule biographies, with photos when possible, of those killed on 9/11. “Portraits” was a daily feature, filling one full page, sometimes two, and ran through New Year’s Eve 2001. Like today’s police killings projects, “Portraits” began, the Times wrote, “as an imperfect answer to a journalistic problem, the absence of a definitive list of the dead…”

The portraits, now archived online, were based on a phalanx of reporters’ interviews with families and friends of the dead, and gave more personal snapshots (like “Taking Care of Mozard: Maria Isabel Ramirez”) than either the Post or Guardian have the resources to muster today.

The Guardian stories are presented almost Facebook-style in a photo mosaic of faces. You could find yourself, as I did, clicking on faces to see whether they fit or explode the stereotypes you might have of someone who would be killed by the cops, all the time overwhelmed at the scale of the problem.

Beyond the database, The Guardian is running almost-daily features on how police violence affects various communities, including deaths of the mentally ill, women, Latinos, and the elderly (“about six elderly people a month,” it finds).

By the way, that figure of 464 people killed by police in the first five months of 2015 has climbed, as of today, to 489.

 

By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, June 8, 2015

June 14, 2015 Posted by | Law Enforcement, Police Shootings, Police Violence | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Issues Be Damned”: The Hillary-Carly ‘Cat Fight’ That Men, The Media, And Fiorina Want

If Carly Fiorina gains any traction from her barbed attacks on Hillary Clinton, the rightwing cartoons will practically draw themselves: Carly and Hillary in a teeth-baring cat fight, Carly’s claws like a tiger’s, HRC’s eyes as red as a Demon Sheep’s, their hair seriously mussed, and Benghazi burning in the background.

As one man tweeted, “Let the Cat Fight begin!! Fiorina will tear Hillary to shreds.”

“Fiorina vs Hillary in 2016,” someone else raved. Why? “Because men love a cat fight.”

It is indeed a male dream, especially males who are Republican presidential candidates (and who isn’t?). If Carly handles the edgy, personal attacks on Hillary, they figure, we won’t get Rick Lazio-ed off the stage.

But at the press conference-ambush that Fiorina held outside a South Carolina hotel where Clinton was speaking, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO bristled at suggestions that she was doing the male Republicans’ dirty work. Fiorina, Maggie Haberman wrote,

quickly grew discomfited when the questions seemed to treat her more as a heckler pulling a stunt than as a formidable candidate making an otherwise significant campaign stop.

One reporter asked if Ms. Fiorina was being used by the men in the Republican field to harass Mrs. Clinton.

Ms. Fiorina insisted she had planned her trip here “many, many weeks ago, so perhaps she’s following me.”

The first female CEO of a Fortune 20 company has had to deny that she’s a tool of the GOP boys—the poisoned-tip of their spear—for a while now. “The party is not leaning on me to do anything, and I didn’t ask the party’s permission,” she said in March.

She’s her own woman, independent, thinks for herself. But in her self-appointed role as Hillary’s foil, there’s a fascinating tension between the politics of cat-fighting and her feminist-tinged complaints about just those sort of stereotypes. “I think the media hold women to different standards,” she said at the same press conference. “[The press] scrutinizes women differently, criticizes women different, caricatures women differently.”

But even as Fiorina wants everyone to know that’s she’s more than Hillary’s would-be bête noir (“the vast majority of my speeches in front of anyone are about a host of issues,” she told reporters), in many ways she is also Hillary’s doppelganger. They have much in common:

1) Most obviously, both are women vying for power in a man’s world. They are considered “demographically symbolic” (as the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre sneered about Obama’s entire presidency), and they each have a deck of “gender cards” to draw from. It’s perfectly legit, since women have been largely banned from the card games. But while Hillary is playing pinochle, Fiorina is playing something closer to three-card monte. As Amanda Marcotte writes:

In recent months, Fiorina has shown that the only thing she loves more than deriding those who play the “gender card” is playing the gender card….

“If Hillary Clinton were to face a female nominee, there are a whole set of things that she won’t be able to talk about,” Fiorina told reporters in April. “She won’t be able to talk about being the first woman president. She won’t be able to talk about a war on women without being challenged. She won’t be able to play the gender card.” No she won’t, because I, Carly Fiorina, will play it for her!

2) They are so much alike that Fiorina claims Hillary stole the title of her recent memoir, “Hard Choices,” from Fiorina’s account of her widely criticized tenure at HP, “Tough Choices,” which was published in 2006.

“And last month,” Amy Chozick writes, “after Mrs. Clinton urged 5,000 female tech professionals in Silicon Valley to ‘unlock our full potential,’ Ms. Fiorina again accused Mrs. Clinton of stealing: Her leadership political action committee, an aide to Ms. Fiorina noted, is called the Unlocking Potential Project.”

3) That could be a case of bad-faith borrowing, or it could all be a coincidence. As Jason Linkins points out, “’unlock your potential’ may actually be the most banal phrase these Thought Leader types employ.” Fiorina seems to think she owns this sort of MEGO boilerplate because she comes from big biz, but the truth is that both women are corporatist, business-friendly politicians, supported by industry and Wall Street.

4) Both women have worked very hard to please powerful peers who are almost without exception white males—at HP, Fiorina laid off more than 30,000 people (see CarlyFiorina.org); and Hillary voted for the Iraq War as she was preparing to run in 2008.

Fiorina has to be aggressive, of course, because she’s the newbie—never won an election, while Clinton was a two-term senator from New York, not to mention Secretary of State. But one interesting difference between the two is that Hillary has refrained from attacking other women politicians—even, in 2008, Sarah Palin. “You know, I don’t want to be the chick police,” says Nicole Wallace, who famously quit the Palin campaign, but Fiorina’s focus on Hillary, she says, “runs the risk of having it look personal.”

It wouldn’t be Fiorina’s first foray into the too-personal: when she thought she was off mic during her 2010 race against California senator Barbara Boxer, Fiorina said she had seen her opponent on TV and wondered, “God, what is that hair? So yesterday.”

Naturally, the Democratic Clinton and the Republican Fiorina differ on issue after issue—immigration reform, abortion, equal pay, foreign policy. But let me acknowledge that in writing about these two women, I have, like so much of the media, completely stayed away from any mention of any issue.

Because… CAT FIGHT!

 

By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, May 29, 2015

May 30, 2015 Posted by | Carly Fiorina, Hillary Clinton, Media | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“The Golden Parachute Candidate”: Corporate-Jet Conservative Carly Fiorina Wants To Be President, For Some Reason

For reasons that remain unclear, Carly Fiorina is running for president. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO and failed Senate candidate has been teasing a potential run for months now, but this morning she made it official and launched her new official campaign website (which drew almost as much attention as her unofficial campaign website). If you peruse the official site in search of a coherent rationale for why we need a Fiorina presidency, you’ll be left sorely disappointed.

Fiorina’s argument for why she should be president seems to be that she’s not Hillary Clinton. She posted a short video that ostensibly explains why she’s running, and the first image you see is the back of Fiorina’s head as she watches Hillary’s announcement video. (Fiorina clicks off the Hillary video with the remote because SYMBOLISM.) From there she launches into an awkward monologue about how politicians shouldn’t run for political office because that’s not what the American Revolution was about. “Our founders never intended us to have a professional political class,” she says. So vote Fiorina, because that’s what the professional political class that founded the country would want.

But Fiorina’s not arguing for herself here; she’s arguing against “politicians.” And the only reason she can make this argument is that her one attempt at becoming part of the “professional political class” ended with a lopsided defeat in a year when other Republicans across the country surged to victory on an anti-Obama wave. This “I’m not a politician” schtick was the same message Fiorina deployed against “professional politician” Barbara Boxer in 2010, and she lost by 10 points. Carly Fiorina’s not a “politician,” but only because she’s bad at politics. Indeed, if she’s saying that America should flock to someone who’s untainted by politics, then why should they back Fiorina over, say, Ben Carson? He’s making the same “I’m not a politician” pitch, but unlike Fiorina, he doesn’t bear the taint of having previously run for office.

Anyway, for her 2016 run, Fiorina says she’ll put an end to “the sound bites, the vitriol, the pettiness, the egos, [and] the corruption,” which is amusing and also hypocritical. No more sound bites, vitriol, and pettiness sure sounds nice until you remember that much of Fiorina’s 2010 campaign was all about painting Barbara Boxer as an out-of-control egotist. They even produced an extremely weird “movie” that depicted Boxer’s “big head” as a grotesque floating blimp that traveled the country inflicting “sound bites” on the masses. No pettiness or vitriol there! After all, Fiorina’s not a politician.

As for ending “corruption,” well, who could be against that? Under the Fiorina regime, there will be no more hand-outs for the privileged and no more payouts for people who don’t do the job that’s expected of them. On a related note, Carly Fiorina received $21 million (plus $19 million in stock options) for being fired as CEO of Hewlett-Packard in 2005.

Speaking of that Hewlett-Packard experience, running on her tenure as CEO did her little good in 2010, mainly because everyone kept pointing out how many jobs were lost under reign (some 30,000 layoffs) and all the enthusiastic outsourcing she presided over. But she’s going back to the same well for 2016 and offering a highly sanitized retelling of her stewardship of the company. “Carly didn’t always make the most popular decisions at HP,” her website boasts, “but, time and time again, they would prove to be the right ones.” And there’s even a little backbiting at the Hewlett-Packard board for forcing her out:

But even though her record as CEO speaks for itself, Carly faced headwinds from people who did not want to see HP change. They wanted to double-down on a flawed agenda that simply wasn’t sustainable against the new challenges of the 21st Century.

Yes, you can certainly tell that Carly Fiorina hates sound bites and isn’t a “professional politician” – only real, authentic people use phrases like “double-down on a flawed agenda” and “new challenges of the 21st Century [capitalized for some reason].” Fiorina’s list of accomplishments as HP CEO include “doubled revenues” and the fact that they were cranking out “11 patents a day.” She’s clearly hoping that people will confuse “good for a giant tech company’s bottom line” with “good for America.”

So at this moment, there is no real justification for why Carly Fiorina is running for president. At the very least, though, she’s carving out a unique space for herself. While other candidates are scrambling to show off their populist cred and fake concern over income inequality, Fiorina is embracing her legacy as a failed tech CEO gliding along on a golden parachute.

 

By: Simon Maloy, Salon, May 4, 2015

May 6, 2015 Posted by | Carly Fiorina, GOP Presidential Candidates, Politicians | , , , , , | 1 Comment

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