Fiorina fact-checks the Washington Post

Asked how the 2016 GOP candidate responded to the Post article, Flores added, “When I told [Fiorina] about it, she laughed for about five seconds.”

The Post’s fact-checker, Michelle Ye Hee Lee, maintained that Fiorina’s supposed “rags-to-riches” narrative downplays the reality of the businesswoman’s allegedly privileged life, and glosses over details of how her education and family connections put her on the “fast track” to senior management at both Lucent and Hewlett-Packard.

For this, the Post awarded Fiorina three “Pinocchios,” just one shy of a full flunking grade, for telling people she rose from secretary to CEO.

In interviews and writing, the GOP candidate has said that her business success is a testament to the greatness of the United States, and the unique opportunities it makes available.

“I started as a secretary, typing and filing for a nine-person real estate firm. It’s only in this country that you can go from being a secretary to chief executive of the largest tech company in the world, and run for president of the United States,” the sole female in the GOP’s 2016 presidential field said in a September interview. “It’s only possible here.”

Elsewhere, during the second televised GOP primary debate, she said, “My story, from secretary to CEO, is only possible in this nation, and proves that everyone of us has potential.”

The former CEO did, in fact, work secretarial jobs prior to taking the top spot at major U.S. businesses. But these and other comments leave out the fact that Fiorina had a good education, and that her father was well-connected in academia, which damage the image that Fiorina came from nothing, Lee wrote.

“Fiorina’s description of rising ‘from secretary to CEO’ conjures a Horatio Alger-like narrative where a character starts at the lowest ranks of an industry, pulls themselves up by their bootstraps and, against all odds, reaches the top position in the industry,” she wrote.

“[Fiorina] glosses over important details. Her father was dean of Duke Law School when she was at Stanford, meaning Duke would have paid for most of her college tuition. She graduated from Stanford, and her elite degree played a role in the stories of her at Marcus & Millichap … and her convincing the business school dean to accept her into the MBA program,” she wrote.

Lee conceded that Fiorina did indeed work low-level jobs before rising to the position of senior management. Nevertheless, the fact-checker explained, by failing to mention also that she had access to a good education, the GOP candidate intentionally misleads on the details of her supposedly charmed life.

“[Fiorina] always intended to attend graduate school for her career. She moved up through AT&T with her MBA, and was placed on a fast track to senior management after her company sponsored her to attend one of the most elite mid-career fellowships in the world,” Lee wrote.

“Fiorina uses a familiar, ‘mailroom to boardroom’ trope of upward mobility that the public is familiar with, yet her story is nothing like that,” she added. “In telling her only-in-America story, she conveniently glosses over the only-for-Fiorina opportunities and options beyond what the proverbial mailroom worker has.”

Fiorina’s team maintains that the candidate has never misrepresented or downplayed the facts of her personal and professional life.

“The Washington Post starts with three quotes that they eventually admit are all true. They agree Carly was a secretary for a year after college (and during college for that matter),” Flores told the Examiner, “but that’s not enough because eventually she went to business school before becoming a CEO?”

“I don’t remember the Washington Post saying that President Obama wasn’t a community organizer because he eventually went to Harvard Law School,” she added. “Also, note they imply Carly was trying to hide her background from voters — by putting it all in her book Tough Choices, which is the Post’s main source for calling her a liar.”