Carly Fiorina is still masquerading as a Republican candidate for president – although her poll numbers remain dismal – so perhaps we must pay attention to her. The longer she sticks around, however, the more she demonstrates that she is even more awful than anyone realized.
Which is, for the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and busted Senate candidate, a kind of achievement.
Attempting to reintroduce herself to America as the anti-Hillary, Fiorina has repeatedly attacked the work of the Clinton Foundation, repeating lies she reads in right-wing media about its budget and expenditures. When Fox News Channel interviewed her on June 10, she complained, “We are finding so little of the charitable donations [collected by the Clinton Foundation] go to charitable work.” Based on her interpretation of the foundation’s IRS 990 forms, she estimated that only 6 percent of its funds have gone toward charitable purposes.
Uttered by someone who claims to be a brilliant executive — which presumably includes the capacity to read and comprehend financial documents — that was an embarrassingly stupid remark. Very little knowledge or expertise is required to figure out that the Clinton Foundation is an operating entity, or really a public charity, whose salaries, travel expenses, and other costs reflect actual work on the ground all over the world.
Now the nonpartisan Factcheck.org has bluntly corrected Fiorina’s nonsensical accusation in a long, painstaking refutation of what she and others (including a Fox News genius named Gerri Willis) have said about the Clinton Foundation’s spending.
“Fiorina is simply wrong,” according to the Factcheck report, which went on to assess the foundation’s budget in detail. The bottom line, according to the philanthropy analysts at CharityWatch, is that the Clinton Foundation spends 89 percent of donations for charitable purposes – well above the industry standard of 75 percent.
But that’s not even the worst part. Fiorina could have found out these facts very easily, because she is involved with groups that work with the Clinton Global Initiative and even got herself some free publicity in 2014 by appearing at a CGI event with former President Clinton.
So she mounted a damaging political assault on the same organization whose goodwill she had exploited for her own purposes, casually defaming thousands of foundation employees who perform important work — without even attempting to learn the truth from them first.
To me, this indicates personal character so low as to disqualify her for any elected office, let alone the presidency. She is untrustworthy as well as incompetent.
Anyone who has studied Fiorina’s career probably knows that already. Discussing her disdain for a minimum-wage increase at the CGI event, she blamed increasing economic inequality on “crony capitalism” – a problem highlighted, of course, by her own $40 million golden parachute, which enraged Hewlett-Packard stockholders, executives, and workers.
