Carly Fiorina is back in attack mode after surging to fourth place among GOP presidential candidates following last week’s Republican primary debate.
The former Hewlett-Packard executive, who’s positioned herself as an ardent foe of the Democratic Party’s leading lady, unleashed on Hillary Clinton in a Thursday op-ed for CNN.
“Clinton thinks she is entitled to your vote. I am working hard to earn it,” Fiorina wrote Thursday.
“Where Clinton has lied and evaded in response to questions, I have stood firmly on my track record of accomplishments,” she wrote. “I have sought out every opportunity to answer questions from the media and the American people. I don’t lie about tough calls. I acknowledge them because that is what the American people deserve.”
The GOP’s only female candidate used her closing statement during last week’s undercard debate to blast Clinton, saying she “lies about Benghazi, lies about her emails, is still defending Planned Parenthood.” Now Fiorina says she’s seeing an uptick not just in support, but in criticism from Clinton’s camp.
“The Clinton Machine has decided to attack me by talking about my greatest accomplishment: shattering the glass ceiling to become the first female CEO of Hewlett-Packard, a Fortune 500 company,” she wrote.
Less than 24 hours after Fiorina emerged from the happy hour debate with widespread praise for her performance, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz blasted her on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“What’s impressive about a woman who nearly drove a Fortune 500 company into the ground? Who fired 30,000 people when she was CEO?” Wasserman Schultz told host Joe Scarborough, before noting that Fiorina’s tenure as CEO ended with her being fired.
“Obviously, her board of directors didn’t think she was doing a very good job,” she said.
In her written reaction, Fiorina defended her management of the leading technology firm and accused critics like Wasserman Schultz of using “empty talking points and bumper sticker rhetoric” against her.
“The left has tried to attack me because I was fired from Hewlett-Packard. Yes, I was fired in a boardroom brawl, which I’ve been up front about since the day it happened,” she wrote, adding that the “toughest call that a CEO has to make is to tell an honest, hard-working employee that for a company to survive there is no longer a job for him or her.”
“That is a hard choice [but] at Hewlett-Packard, those decisions saved 140,000 jobs and allowed HP to grow to 30,000 employees today,” she wrote.
Fiorina, who has prided herself as someone who “challenged the status quo,” went on to describe Clinton as “the epitome of a professional political class that has managed a bloated, inept, corrupt federal government for far too long.”
“We need a president who will answer every question and face every challenge,” she wrote. “The political class may continue to attack my record. I have named many accomplishments. Why won’t Hillary Clinton name one?”
Fiorina began a five-day trip through Iowa and Nevada Thursday where she plans to speak to a local Jewish interest group and will join a number of her GOP rivals at the upcoming Iowa State Fair.
