By Reid J. Epstein And Elizabeth Williamson
Aiming to fill two niches left vacant by the rest of the
presumptive 2016 Republican presidential field, Carly Fiorina on
Monday formally launched her White House campaign.
Ms. Fiorina, the only woman and the only Republican who comes
from the business world in the race, announced her candidacy by
changing her Facebook profile picture to read, "Carly for
President."
"Yes, I am running for president," the former Hewlett-Packard
CEO said during a Monday morning interview on ABC's "Good Morning
America." "I think I'm the best person for the job because I
understand how the economy actually works. I understand the world,
who's in it, how the world works."
The presidential campaign is an attempt at a career comeback of
sorts for Mrs. Fiorina, who was fired by the HP board in 2005 after
a management struggle.
Now Ms. Fiorina, 60 years old, is pitching herself as a
conservative with global business experience. She has met with
foreign leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, she says,
and is the only Republican who can negate the historic nature of
presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's effort to become
the first woman president.
In her pitch to the Conservative Political Action Conference in
February, Ms. Fiorina poked the globe-trotting former secretary of
state with the line: "Flying is an activity, not an
accomplishment," and closed with the zinger: "If Hillary Clinton
had to face me on a debate stage, at the very least she would have
a hitch in her swing."
Ms. Fiorina has proved popular so far among Republican activists
in early nominating states. Yet her path to a first-tier candidacy
requires accepting a number of inconsistencies.
She says the three first-term senators lack sufficient
experience to be commander-in-chief, but she doesn't have that line
on her résumé, having lost to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) in
2010, her first foray into politics as a candidate.
And Ms. Fiorina is aiming to appeal to the same conservative
activists she alienated in 2008 when she said Sarah Palin, then the
GOP's vice presidential nominee, wasn't qualified to run a major
corporation.
Ms. Fiorina was sacked from the job for which she is best known.
The Hewlett-Packard board fired her after a 2005
boardroom-management slugfest. She now brands herself as a social
conservative--though one who granted benefits to gay couples as a
CEO and says she'd oppose a constitutional amendment to forbid gay
marriage. And she says she is uniquely qualified to lead the charge
against "crony capitalism: when big business and big government get
together to stack the deck against the small."
Like most of her GOP rivals, Ms. Fiorina opposes the Common Core
national education standards and the Affordable Care Act. She would
kill off the Export-Import Bank, which she says is emblematic of
the too-cozy relationship between big business and big
government.
"We have two structural problems in this economy. One, we are
tangling people's lives up in a web of dependence," she says,
through welfare programs that discourage entrepreneurial
risk-taking. Second, she says, "What we need to do is recognize
that while big companies are really important, it's the little guys
that are the engine of growth in this economy."
Born in Austin, Texas, Mrs. Fiorina graduated from Stanford
University and has master's degrees from the University of Maryland
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She now lives in suburban Washington and leads two charitable
organizations: Opportunity International, which makes loans of as
little as $150 to impoverished would-be entrepreneurs, and Good360,
which channels excess corporate inventory to the poor.
Ms. Fiorina hasn't held any full-time private-sector job since
leaving H-P a decade ago. She has never served in elected office,
and her government service is limited to unpaid service on the
Defense Business Board, which looked at staffing issues, among
others, at the Pentagon; and two years as chair of the Central
Intelligence Agency's External Advisory Board, from 2007 to
2009.
Write to Reid J. Epstein at Reid.Epstein@wsj.com and Elizabeth
Williamson at elizabeth.williamson@wsj.com
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