In her first week as a candidate for president, Carly Fiorina’s TV schedule alone has been dizzyingly prolific. Since announcing her run on May 4th, Fiorina has done the following: two interviews on ABC’s Good Morning America; two Fox News interviews, one in the morning and another in primetime; a primetime CNN appearance; NBC’s the Today Show, the Late Show, and Meet the Press; a hit on all three cable business networks, CNBC, Fox Business, and Bloomberg; and a live interview on Yahoo with Katie Couric. It’s what her campaign’s calling a “media blitz,” and they hope to contrast Fiorina with opponent number one, Hillary Clinton.
In a memo, campaign manager Frank Sadler notes that Fiorina had taken 322 questions from the media in the 8 days of her campaign. Compare that, Sadler said, to the Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who had taken about eight questions from the press in her month-long campaign.
“Unlike Hillary Clinton, I am not afraid to answer questions about my track record or my accomplishments or my principles,” Fiorina said over the weekend at a Republican confab in South Carolina.
So how is the media blitz going for Fiorina? Throughout the first week, the Republican has faced two related questions: one trivial, the other substantive. How she answered both of them demonstrates how the Republican and former tech executive will defend what serves as both her biggest asset and liability in the presidential race—her business record.
First, the trivial. Soon after Fiorina’s campaign announcement, it was revealed that the campaign had not secured all of its web domains. An anonymous user owns the rights to carlyfiorina.org, and the web address leads to a page denouncing Fiorina’s tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. “Carly Fiorina failed to register this domain,” reads the message. “So I’m using it to tell you how many people she laid off at Hewlett-Packard.” Below are 30,000 frowning emoticons. (Update: The site is apparently owned by Michael Link, an employee at the Service Employees International Union.) The political press pounced on the story, with some uncreatively deeming it “domaingate.”
The domain issue reflects a prevailing view that Republicans are out-of-touch with the Internet and digitally ignorant. Fiorina decided to embrace the mistake with a couple of clever domain purchases of her own. During an appearance on NBC’s comedy show Late Night, Fiorina laughed off the oversight before revealing to host Seth Meyers that she had bought sethmeyers.org, which redirects to her campaign site, just minutes before. She did the same thing with chucktodd.org after appearing on NBC journalist Chuck Todd’s more staid Meet the Press program. To top it off, BuzzFeed reported Sunday that a few Hillary Clinton domains, like hillaryclinton.net, also redirect to the Fiorina campaign’s site. Commentators had turned a minor snafu into a small obsession, but Fiorina flipped it around to her advantage with a dash of humor.
The second issue for Fiorina, more perilous to laugh off, is her record at HP itself, including those 30,000 frowning faces. On Meet the Press, Todd asked Fiorina why the board of HP fired her from the top job in 2005.
“I managed Hewlett-Packard through the worst technology recession in 25 years, and yes, indeed, some tough calls were necessary,” Fiorina said. “On the other hand, many companies which we competed are gone all together.” The former CEO ticked off a list of metrics, including doubling the size of the company, improving its growth rate and the number of patents it received, and creating more jobs overall. She was a victim, she argued, of internal corporate politics. “I was fired in a boardroom brawl,” Fiorina said.
Todd pressed Fiorina to explain HP’s stock price, noting that it jumped seven percent the day Fiorina was fired, after it had fallen throughout her tenure there.
“The stock market is not a good arbiter of success over the long term,” Fiorina pushed back. “The average holding of stock today is less than 90 days. It is more a reflection of current emotion and conventional wisdom than anything else. A CEO cannot run a company based on conventional wisdom or current emotion. A CEO’s job is to build sustainable value over the long term for as many employees, as many customers and as many communities as possible.”
It’s a complicated answer to the complicated question of Fiorina’s record at HP. The truth is somewhere in between her stellar report card for the company and the over-the-top pronouncements that Fiorina ran HP into the ground. But as a political matter, Fiorina appears to be dealing with the question with statistical facts (her answer to Todd used the word “fact” four times) and a pivot toward emphasizing her leadership qualities.
“It is a leader’s job to challenge the status quo. When you do, you make enemies,” she told Todd.
That record’s not likely to cause her too many problems in a Republican primary, whose voters might be more forgiving than Democrats of a businesswoman who had to make cuts in “tough times.” But if Fiorina were selected as a vice presidential candidate or even gained traction in the GOP primary, it’s possible voters will meet some of the real faces of those laid off by HP. A pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC did as much in attacking Mitt Romney’s business record during the 2012 primary, themes Barack Obama and the Democrats continued into the general election. What remains to be seen is whether Fiorina has a better response if and when that time comes for her.
