ROAD TO 2016: CARLY FIORINA
Born Sept. 6, 1954, age 60, in Austin, Texas.
Political party: Republican
Political experience: Ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California. Adviser to GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona in his 2008 presidential campaign.
Business: Former vice president, AT&T; former executive at Lucent Technologies; ex-CEO of Hewlett-Packard, 1999 to 2005. Current chairwoman of the American Conservative Union Foundation, the annual host of CPAC.
Education: Bachelor’s degree, Stanford University, with majors in medieval history and philosophy. Master of Business Administration, University of Maryland.
Family: Husband, Frank Fiorina.
Interesting factoid: After college, Fiorina took a receptionist job at the real estate firm Marcus & Millichap before moving up to broker. The experience prompted her to attend graduate school for business, after which she began at AT&T as a management trainee.
Carly Fiorina was known mostly, if at all, as a former Hewlett-Packard CEO who had run a failed U.S. Senate campaign in California.
That is, she was until she “won” the so-called junior varsity debate of the seven GOP presidential candidates with the lowest polling figures on Aug. 6.
Fiorina went after Republican front-runner Donald Trump, even though the developer didn’t appear on stage until hours later in the main event.
Fiorina, the first woman to lead a Fortune 20 company, captured headlines for the move, then generated more attention with an appearance at the RedState Gathering in Atlanta and on weekend news shows.
By early last week, she was within the top five candidates in the crowded GOP field, according to multiple polls.
PolitiFact has fact-checked just nine statements Fiorina made as of Wednesday.
Of them, one was rated True and one was rated Mostly True, or 11 percent each. She earned two ratings in Half True, Mostly False and False, or 22 percent each. She also earned one Pants on Fire ruling.
See them all at www.politifact.com/personalities/carly-fiorina/.
Carly Fiorina on Aug. 6, 2015, in the first Republican presidential debate
Says Donald Trump has “changed his mind” on abortion.
Fiorina made several points questioning the GOP bona fides of front-runner Trump in the first Republican debates.
When asked about the developer’s top position in the polls, Fiorina explained that Trump has connected with a legitimate frustration.
“Whatever your issue, your cause, the festering problem you hoped would (be) resolved, the political class has failed you,” Fiorina said. “That’s just a fact, and that’s what Donald Trump taps into. I would also just say this: Since he has changed his mind on amnesty, on health care and on abortion, I would just ask, what are the principles by which he will govern?”
By Trump’s own admission, it is accurate to say he has changed his mind on abortion.
As late as 2000, he wrote that he supported abortion rights. By 2011, he said he was anti-abortion.
Recently, he noted that he thinks exceptions for the life of the mother, incest and rape are appropriate.
We rate Fiorina’s claim True.
Carly Fiorina on May 10, 2015, in comments on NBC’s “Meet the Press
“We doubled the size of the company (Hewlett-Packard).”
One of Fiorina’s greatest accomplishments — serving as CEO of a Fortune 20 firm — also makes her a great target for critics.
Nearly 30,000 people were laid off during her tenure at the computer company Hewlett-Packard. The company’s board later fired her.
When asked about being sacked, Fiorina used the question to list her accomplishments at HP.
“What people fail to comment on is the fact we doubled the size of the company, took the growth rate from 2 percent to 9 percent,” she said. “We tripled the rate of innovation to 11 patents a day and went from lagging behind to leading in every product category. We grew jobs here in the U.S. and all over the world. You can’t just leave those facts out — they are as vital to the record as the fact that yes, indeed, I had to make tough calls during tough times.”
Looking specifically at revenue created by the company, HP did double.
That growth, however, was largely thanks to a controversial merger with Compaq and not organic. Moreover, the new revenue did not come with proportional increases to either profits or the number of HP jobs.
Fiorina’s figures are accurate, but standing alone, they don’t tell the whole picture.
We rate her claim Mostly True.
Carly Fiorina on Aug. 9, 2015, in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union”
“If you look at the results of Obamacare, what you see is emergency room visits are up over 50 percent.”
Fresh off her debate successes, Fiorina took aim at the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.
“Demonstrably, if you look at the results of Obamacare, what you see is emergency room visits are up over 50 percent,” she said during a CNN interview.
The most recent official statistics on ER visits from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cover 2011 — well before most elements of the law kicked in.
A March 2015 survey from the American College of Emergency Physicians found that only 5 percent of respondents saw any decrease in patients in their emergency room, giving some validation for Fiorina’s claim.
But Fiorina said emergency room visits “are up over 50 percent” — not that a majority of emergency room doctors say they are seeing more patients come for treatment.
In reality, the survey does not offer specifics on how many more visits there have been after implementation of the law. And a plurality of respondents suggest that the increases they’ve seen are “slight,” which doesn’t sound like a word most people would use to describe a 50 percent increase.
We rate her claim Mostly False.
Carly Fiorina on Jan. 12, 2014, in a broadcast of ABC’s “This Week”
“Seventy percent of the people living in abject poverty are women.”
Fiorina repeated a claim in 2014 that was first made two decades ago.
“Seventy percent of the people living in abject poverty are women,” Fiorina said.
But so far as anyone can tell, that statement has no basis in fact. Fiorina’s office did not return requests for supporting data.
We went to the World Bank data pages and contacted the bank’s research staff. We exchanged emails with the United Nations Development Programme and UN Women, an entity focused on gender equality. None of them could point to statistics that would confirm this claim.
Poverty surveys don’t count how many women and men live in each household. Statisticians, some within the United Nations itself, began debunking the 70 percent figure as early as 1998 — just three years after it gained prominence.
We rate this claim False.
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