Republican Presidential Hopeful Carly Fiorina to Fundraise in OC Today

Carly Fiorina is scheduled to conduct a fundraiser tonight for her campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, six days before the end of the quarterly reporting period.

Candidates are required to file fundraising reports for the second three months of the year with the Federal Election Commission by July 15. Those reports can be an early indication of a candidate’s viability.

Tickets are priced at $250 for a cocktail reception, $1,000 for a private cocktail party with the opportunity to have a photo taken with Fiorina and $2,700, the maximum individual contribution for a candidate seeking his or her party’s presidential nomination, to join Fiorina at dinner, according to an invitation posted on the website of the Lincoln Club of Orange County.

The event is closed to reporters, like nearly all fundraisers for presidential candidates.

Fiorina announced her candidacy during an appearance on the ABC morning news program “Good Morning America” on May 4, saying, “I think I am 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.

“I understand bureaucracies and that’s what our federal government has become, a giant bloated, unaccountable corrupt bureaucracy. I understand technology, which is a tool, both to reimagine government and to engage citizens in the process of government.

“Our nation was intended to be a citizen government, but somehow we’ve come to this place in our nation’s history where we think we need a professional political class. I don’t believe that.”

Fiorina’s campaign slogan is “New possibilities. Real leadership.”

Fiorina was chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, the first woman to be the CEO of a Fortune 50 business. In her only previous campaign for office, she unsuccessfully ran for a Senate seat in California in 2010, losing to Sen. Barbara Boxer.

In both her campaigns for the Senate and presidency, Fiorina has drawn criticism from Democrats for layoffs at Hewlett-Packard.

When she declared her candidacy for president, California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton described Fiorina as a “failed CEO” whose “company lost half its value” during her tenure.

In a May 4 interview with Yahoo Global News anchor Katie Couric, Fiorina addressed such criticism

“In the middle of the biggest technology recession in 25 years we doubled the company to almost $90 billion. We took the growth rate from 2 percent to 9 percent. We tripled the rate of innovation to 11 patents a day. We quadrupled the cash flow,” she said..

“We went from lagging behind in every category to leading in every category. We created jobs.”

Fiorina added that every technology company laid off workers when she was Hewlett-Packard’s CEO.

“It’s a terrible decision to have to make, but sometimes there are tough decisions that must be made to strengthen a company for the long haul,” Fiorina said.”It was a tough time I managed through, but we transformed a company from failing to succeeding.”

The 60-year-old Fiorina, who is seeking to be the nation’s first female president, is chairman of the American Conservative Union, which organizes the Conservative Political Action Conference, described as the nation’s largest annual gathering of conservatives; chairman of Good360, billed as the world’s largest product philanthropy organization, entailing the charitable giving of products; and chairman of Opportunity International, which calls itself the world’s largest nonprofit micro-finance lender.

City News Service

Photo Wikimedia Commons