Dang it Carly, you blew a grand opportunity. An no, I’m not referring to a middle-of-the-pack performance at the last Republican debate. After a short and impressive few minutes in the spotlight, Carly Fiorina’s campaign seems to be fading quickly. It seems like it was just a month ago that I was praising her for scoring her first Washington Post hit piece, and now that momentum seems to have completely stalled.I know, Carly is hardly a perfect candidate – she faces some legitimate criticism, as commentor Nanny G. at Flopping Aces pointed out in my previous post:
I was in CA when Carly ran for office there.
Her main pollster was found dead on the floor of his own home surrounded by work he’d been doing for her.
She failed to ever pay his estate (widow and children) his last earned paycheck of $30,000.
If that’s how she treats her most helpful employees, how will she treat us peons?
Fair point, and one for which Carly absolutely needs to be able to explain. Of course, some of the criticism leveled at her isn’t quite as legitimate. Fred Costello at the Fairfax Free Citizen reports:
Donald Trump and the Post have been painting Carly Fiorina as a disaster at Hewlett-Packard (HP). Here are the HP stock prices in comparison with other companies in the computer-hardware industry.
HP was recovering when Fiorina left. The recovery would persist for a while until the effects of the new management were felt. So she did well for HP.
The facts don’t seem to be consistent with the narrative, and must be ignored at all costs!
And Carly is not without her strengths, as Ben Brody from Bloomberg reports:
She’s “an outsider with insider knowledge,” said King, who said he often texts with Fiorina and is thinking of endorsing her. “I think she has a real potential to unite the party and also be a strong national candidate.”
But most importantly, she “Speaks conservative as a first language”, and that is a huge part of the battle. Politico’s Nick Gass reported on how Carly is ready to come out swinging against the Radical Left’s notion that women have to unthinkingly follow the Democratic party:
“Actually, note to Democrat Party: We’re half the nation. And so our views differ, just like men’s views differ,” Fiorina said. “And yes, I think I am distinctly horrifying to liberals that I am a conservative woman who right now, head-to-head, beats Hillary Clinton soundly.”
Speaking conservative as a first language? American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson wrote on Carly’s criticism of Planned Parenthood’s practices:
Of course they’re trying to change the subject. Of course they’re trying to say this is life saving research. I find it amazing that this group of pro-abortion lobbyists continue to say that they are protecting women’s health. Really? late-term abortion is bad for women’s health. They continue to lobby against parental notification. Really? It’s protecting a teenager’s health that she can go to a tanning salon or a tattoo with her mother’s permission but get an abortion without her mother’s permission? This is not about someone else’s health. This is about a woman’s health. A woman’s opportunity to have all of the choices in front of her and it’s about a life that she is bearing.”
Damned straight. As I mentioned previously, abortion isn’t a big issue for me, but the dishonesty that the Radical Left uses to discuss it is. Which brings me to the blown opportunity from a few weeks ago. The Orlando Sentinel’s Hal Boedecker summed up:
Republican candidate Carly Fiorina was widely seen as the victor last week at CNN’s GOP presidential debate. But Chris Wallace of “Fox News Sunday” challenged one of Fiorina’s most acclaimed moments: Her passionate and graphic comments about Planned Parenthood and fetal research. She said the issue was about “the character of our nation.”
Wallace asked: “Do you acknowledge what every fact checker has found — that as horrific as that scene is — it was only described on a video by someone who claimed to have seen it? There is no actual footage of the incident you just mentioned?”
Fiorina’s response: “No, I don’t accept that at all. I’ve seen the footage, and I find it amazing, actually, that all these supposed fact checkers in the mainstream media claim this doesn’t exist.”
She added that she hadn’t found many people in the mainstream media who had watched the video. “Anyone who wants to challenge me first is going to have to prove to me that they watched it,” Fiorina said.
On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said she had seen excerpts from the Planned Parenthood videos.“What I am troubled by are the misleading, inaccurate allegations about them that we heard from Republicans at their debate,” Clinton told CBS’ John Dickerson. “This is really an attack on Planned Parenthood, which provides a lot of health services, from cancer screenings to contraceptive services to so many other of the needs women have.”
Clinton added that the tapes were misleadingly edited and taken out of context, repeating what Planned Parenthood has said. She said to shut down the government over funding for Planned Parenthood would be “the height of irresponsibility.”
And there is the missed opportunity. Carly should have called on Hillary to join her and set the record straight. The two could meet on CNN with one of their DNC hacks to host and sat together and watched the entire, unedited video. Even better, let’s watch some video footage of the organs being harvested. Don’t like it, too grotesque? Too damned bad. If we want to allow late term abortions as a society then so be it, but the Radical Left shouldn’t be allowed to sanitize what’s being done in their typical dishonest language.
Carly missed an opportunity to keep the spotlight and take the offensive to one piece of the radical Left’s most hallowed sanctuaries. Personally, I’m hoping that she’s choosing to lay relatively low at the moment to avoid Scott Walker’s fate of peaking too soon. But if this is the beginning of the end for Carly, we can trace it to this point where she missed a golden opportunity.
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FCross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog
Take a look at this graphic.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_republican_presidential_nomination-3823.html
Set the color graph for 3 months.
Carly had a ”dead cat bounce,” between Sept 23rd and until Sept 30th. One week.
I think the most important thing that hurts her is that she had not done anything of import for the last ten years, after her political run in CA.
That’s a long blank in a resume.
When you say she is ”laying low,” remember, she has put out feelers for PAID speechifying.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/carly-fiorina-paid-speeches-2016-215202
Is she seeking money because her campain is cash poor?
I think so.
Her donors are #1 herself.
Then Marmik Oil, Paul Singer, founder of hedge fund Elliott Management, Charles Snowden Jones, founder of Bedford Funding, a New York investing firm, Wall Street banks: Morgan Stanley, Societe General, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo.
Add to those Murray Energy, Linda McMahon, former CEO of WWE, Oaktree Capital Management, a Los Angeles-based investing firm, Ken Griffin, CEO of Citadel, the huge Chicago-based hedge fund, and oil man T. Boone Pickens.
According to the FEC she only had $5.5 million on hand on Oct 1st.
This in a campaign guesstimated to cost a billion dollars.
take a look at that graph you put up, and realize that the rise that you see that your comparing too is when she left the company… it got a 7% rise the day they announced her going… so when you look at the graphic, remember that the biggest boost came from her leaving
D Trump is just repeating the facts from Forbes…
Shares of Hewlett-Packard, the tech giant she ran from 1999 to 2005, fell 45% during her tenure, and she was thrown out as CEO. That doesn’t sound great.
During Fiorina’s full tenure at HP, the NASDAQ fell just 23%, or half as much as HP’s stock. IBM, which Fiorina viewed as a model, struggled during the period that Fiorina was CEO of HP. But its shares did better than HP’s during the time, falling 29%.
Shares of Dell, on the other hand, were up 11% during Fiorina’s reign at Hewlett-Packard. What’s more, HP’s crown jewel was not its computer business, it was the printer business. Shares of Lexmark, a competitor in that business, rose 29% during Fiorina’s tenure.
Fiorina also said on Wednesday evening that while she was CEO of HP, she “doubled the size of the company, we quadrupled its topline growth rate, we quadrupled its cash flow, we tripled its rate of innovation.”
When it comes to size, it’s not clear what she is talking about. Typically, Wall Street thinks of the size of the company as its market capitalization, which is the total net worth of a company. But like HP’s stock, that dropped during Fiorina’s stint as CEO, from $106 billion to $56 billion.
Fiorina could have been talking about sales, which did double during her tenure. -=-=-=- that was largely because of HP’s acquisition of Compaq. -=-=-=- even factoring in the acquisition, HP’s sales rose by $9 billion over three years.
That’s only a growth rate of around 3.5%. In the three years before the Compaq deal, HP’s revenue growth averaged just under 5%
HP’s cash flow did grow under Fiorina, but not by as much as she claims.
here is fortune magazines take on the merger (it was awful)
http://fortune.com/2011/08/21/why-carlys-big-bet-is-failing-fortune-classics-2005/
i really dont like it when people write stuff they dont understand or say stuff that isnt true, even more so when they are trying to make the truth untruth by doing so. (it doesnt help if they dont know thats what they are doing)
carly was awful, she turned a top tech innovative company into a printer cartrige company, and those of us who remember what HP was mourn that time!!!!!!!!
this is about as good as the idiots that claimed that trump wasnt a good business man because he could have earned more if he took his inheritance and put it in an S&P index fund… funny, but he inherited in 1974, and the first S&P fund wasnt until 1995… so thats a big pile of wet steaming bull puckies… even more if you think how much he would have lost liquidating to have a cash position that he then had to sit on for 21 years before he could even try what was being said… AND if that aint enough, their math was from the time you could not do it not from the time of the first vanguard fund… [besides any idiot who was looking back to say what one should invest in who knows what they are talking about, would have said put some of his money in Magellan Fund at Fidelity Investments – which went from $18 million to $14 billion and had only 1000 investors in it]
sigh…
@Artfldgr: Are you suggesting that the chart is wrong, or did you not notice the part about the turnaround starting long before she decided to leave?
And if you’re suggesting that she should have a record like Trump’s, you’re never going to convince this Jersey Boy who grew up with a front row seat to the Rise of Trump. If you want a taste of what Trump will do for the country take a walk down the Atlantic City boardwalk and take in his legacy. Or better still, wander a few blocks off of the boardwalk and you’ll see how non-Trump cronies will be treated.
@Nanny G: Just like with my last post on Carly, all fair points to raise.
I just wish she had taken more advantage of her opportunities – having a thin resume over the last ten years isn’t stopping Hillary, and Carly takes the fight to lefties better than any other candidate we have has done. As much as I like her I doubt she has a shot at winning the primaries, and she would make for a solid attack dog VP.
Let’s see how her feud with the harpies on The View unfolds – I wrote this a few days ago and a bad cold kept me from adding it to this post =8^P
You’re right, it was a missed opportunity, but sometimes you can’t be in control of the shift in public opinions. Her time’s over.
@Lyndon @ CLS: Most likely – being a small timer, Carly needed to stay on the attack. She might be able to parlay her feud with The View into new momentum, but most likely her window has closed
Abortion should be the last resort, not the first. With all the contraceptive devices available out there, why is abortion used so much?
It’s a life, not a choice!
Whatever. Remember when everyone was declaring Carly-who got a $42,000,000.00 parachute from HP when she got fired-Fiorina as the one who would dethrone Trump?
GUFFAW.
Let’s face it, she has a face which can stop a clock and the GOP dog don’t hunt that way.
@Rasputin: And Hillary’s face is better? So are you saying that Republicans are more shallow than Democrats?
Here’s how the voters see Carly:
Poll-plummeting Carly Fiorina attracts only dozens in New Hampshire just minutes after filing her primary papers – and draws dead silence when she invites questions
Note the photo of the free food she had left over after inviting anyone who wanted to join her.
Ouch!
Even The View wanted to put off their scheduled visit from her past this Friday.
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2015/11/04/view-tried-to-postpone-carly-fiorina-appearance/
I love watching these establishment whores attempt to dethrone Trump.
HAHAHAHAHA…..Face that can stop a clock.