Former
HP CEO Fiorina enters 2016 race, takes shot at Clinton
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[May 05, 2015]
By Alistair Bell and Bill Trott
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former
Hewlett-Packard Co <HPQ.N> Chief Executive Carly Fiorina on Monday
announced she is running for president, and took a shot at Democratic
front-runner Hillary Clinton, who she said represents a political class
that Americans are "disgusted" with.
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Once one of the most powerful women in American business, Fiorina
registers near the bottom of polls of the dozen or so Republican
hopefuls and has never held public office.
She is positioning herself as an outsider with real-life experience
earned through years in the corporate world.
Fiorina, 60, said the former first lady and her husband, former
President Bill Clinton, belong to an out-of-touch political elite.
"She reminds people that there is a huge disconnect between that
political class and the hopes and concerns of hard-working Americans
everywhere," she told reporters on a conference call.
"I see that disconnect everywhere I go. I see people just disgusted,
honestly, with the way the playing field is tilted against them, the
disconnect between what they're thinking about and what they
perceive people in Washington are thinking about," Fiorina said.
A breast cancer survivor who lost a stepdaughter to drug addiction,
Fiorina is a multimillionaire who has known adversity.
She was forced to resign from HP in 2005 as the tech company
struggled to digest a $19 billion merger with then-rival computer
maker Compaq.
Around the time of her ouster from HP she was derisively dubbed the
“anti-Steve Jobs” by one respected tech news website, though the
Compaq merger was eventually seen as a success.
Fiorina is at the bottom of a Reuters/Ipsos online poll of actual
and possible Republican White House candidates, with less than 1
percent support.
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She has gotten a warm reception at events in the early voting states
of Iowa and New Hampshire but she suffered an embarrassment on the
first day of her campaign when a critic took over a website with her
name in it to highlight job losses at HP.
Visitors to the carlyfiorina.org site saw the message, "Carly
Fiorina failed to register this domain. So I'm using it to tell you
how many people she laid off at Hewlett-Packard."
The site showed "sad-face" emoticons to symbolize what it said were
30,000 job losses at the company. Fiorina's real campaign web site,
www.carlyforpresident.com, featured a video from her about the
presidential bid and other messages.
In 2010, Fiorina lost the election for a U.S. Senate seat in
California to Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, failing to benefit
from a wave of pro-Republican sentiment nationally.
She said on Monday that her first phone call as president would be
to the prime minister of Israel to assure the Jewish state of
America's support.
The second call, she said, would be to the supreme leader of Iran to
warn him of U.S. sanctions unless he allowed unfettered access for
inspectors to Tehran's nuclear program.
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