Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and unsuccessful Republican candidate for U.S. senator from California, officially announced Monday that she is running for the GOP presidential nomination. But along the way, she kind of forgot something important in her online presence.
Best (or worst) of all, this is a campaign flub that people might find especially surprising from a former executive in the computer industry.
Though Fiorina did secure the domain name of CarlyFiorina.com, which redirects to her official site at CarlyForPresident.com, she and her campaign forgot to nail down another very vital address: CarlyFiorina.org.
A certain someone else did grab it, however — and used the domain to present readers with a none-too-flattering statement about her record in business.
Here’s the site as it appeared Tuesday:
Rows of frowny-face emoticons, each one representing a person laid off by HP during Fiorina’s tenure, continue down the page — and down, and down, and down some more. Finally, the reader reaches the end.
The Hill on Monday uncovered the identity of the prankster: Michael Link, assistant director of digital strategy at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). For his part, however, Link said this project was done on his own, and with his own money, and is not connected to his employers at a major labor union.
Photo: Carly Fiorina speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore via Flickr)
