Fiorina faces big hurdles in state
Many Republicans wary after 2010 Senate defeat, tenure at Hewlett-Packard
ANAHEIM — Carly Fiorina, the muchpraised Iron Lady of the recent GOP presidential debate, is riding a wave of acclamation — but she has some convincing to do among Republicans in her home state who are still smarting from the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive’s crushing defeat in the 2010 U.S. Senate race. “She’s a good speaker” and perhaps the best candidate with the potential to attack Hillary Rodham Clinton, said Joel Fox, a longtime Republican who publishes the popular Fox & Hounds political and business website. “But as the campaign moves ahead, some of the negatives that Californians knew about will move to the fore,” he said. “And that’s the material that a lot of the national folks haven’t heard yet.” “She understands how to speak about the headlines, but when she gets to domestic issues ... boy, she was the Carly of 2010,” conservative blogger Steve Frank said of Fiorina’s debate performance, as he manned the Tea Party Caucus booth at the state GOP convention in the Anaheim Marriott Hotel, where more than 1,000 activists gathered this weekend.
The California GOP concerns about Fiorina
come as the former CEO has jumped to second place in the field of 16 GOP presidential hopefuls, a new CNN/ORC Poll released Sunday shows. Donald Trump remains in first place with 24 percent support from likely GOP voters — but Fiorina’s is now at 15 percent, a 12 percent gain since the debate last week, putting her ahead of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.
With Fiorina’s star on the rise after Wednesday’s debate at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley (Ventura County), where she was praised for her style and steel onstage, the doubts from conservatives at the GOP convention underscore the challenges ahead. Fiorina’s biggest test in California may be her ability to erase the bitterness and the memory of her 2010 midterm defeat, when Democrat Barbara Boxer stomped Fiorina by more than 1 million votes, largely by exploiting Fiorina’s record as CEO of HP.
Some party luminaries, such as millionaire Charles Munger Jr., the state GOP’s most generous donor, said they are focused on the present. “I am backing Carly,” said Munger, who has donated $100,000 to her super PAC. “I’ve had the privilege of hearing her ... She is whip smart, a person with high integrity, and she brings an important voice to the national scene.”
Munger, one of eight children of the billionaire vice chair of the multinational holding company Berkshire Hathaway, brushes aside the suggestion that Fiorina will be hamstrung on HP issues. “I’m going to let the campaign speak on that,” he said. “I’ve picked my pony.”
Still, many at the convention predicted that Fiorina’s business record, which made its way into damaging ads, will haunt her and the Republican Party again if she continues her ascent.
Frank, who publishes California News & Views, a conservative newsletter, said he
talked with Fiorina at length in 2010 and admires her strength. But for most of his readers, “the optics don’t make sense,” he said. “She fired 30,000 — and then tripled her salary.”
Businessman Al Ramirez, one of the five Republicans who ran against Fiorina in the Senate primary in 2010 — and who, like Fiorina, worked at AT&T — predicts that the details of the candidate’s executive record at that firm and at HP will not endear her to average Americans.
“My concern about Carly Fiorina ... is her management style, her abrasiveness, her callousness, her constant approach to doing things in a combative way,” he said. “Donald Trump has proven he can get away with it. We don’t know if she can get away with it.”
‘She’s a nice person’
Celeste Greig, a longtime activist with the Republican Women’s Federated, is also cool to a Fiorina candidacy.
“She’s a nice person, and if she was the nominee, I’d support her,” Greig said. “But friends of mine find her aloof.”
Greig is more interested, she said, in businessman Trump for “his boldness,” in Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for “his intellect,” and in Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for “his eloquence, energy and youth.”
Many GOP activists involved in the 2010 contest are still smarting from Fiorina’s campaign.
Nick Wilson, 33, an Orange County property manager and conservative party activist, bitterly recalls Fiorina’s bashing of then-Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, a grassroots favorite, and said her weaknesses haven’t gone away.
“She didn’t show up for the debate for years by not voting,” said Wilson, who worked for DeVore’s campaign. Wilson referenced 2010 stories that noted Fiorina’s record of voting in just five of 18 national, state and local elections when she was registered to vote in Santa Clara County.
Records also showed she never cast a ballot in two other states where she’s lived: New Jersey and Maryland.
Wilson said such negative information is still circulating on popular conservative websites such as FlashReport.org.
Association with job cuts
One such posting from the 2010 Senate race was written by then-spokesman Josh Treviño of the DeVore campaign and refers to Fiorina as a “monied, shallow, inexperienced celebrity” with a “stupefying array of weaknesses” as head of HP. The post warned Republicans against choosing her over “proven, experienced stalwart conservatives” and predicted she would lose to Boxer. She did, by 10 points.
But Fox, of the Fox & Hounds website, said Fiorina brings strengths to the GOP race and has proved to be a talented communicator. If she’s the nominee, however, “she certainly won’t bring California into the fold” and deliver the state to Republicans, he said.
“It reflects back to (2012 GOP presidential nominee) Mitt Romney with regard to cutting jobs,” Fox said. “We lived through that here in California — and that becomes part of the campaign.’’