Carly Fiorina's performance in the third debate wasn't quite so "breakout" as that of her first and second. In one of the most challenging questions put to Fiorina about her wanting record as CEO of Hewlett Packard, she cited a former colleague who led her firing, Tom Perkins, as publicly saying, "'You know what? We were wrong. She was right. She'd be a great CEO. She'd be a great president of the United States.'"
But it turns out Perkins has a history of not exhibiting the soundest rationale, reports Catherine Thompson.
Perkins notoriously compared the liberal push to reduce income inequality with Nazi Germany's Kristallnacht in a 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed. He raised eyebrows again when he suggested the "one percent" should have a proportionally larger say in American politics. He jokingly called it the "Tom Perkins system:" "You don't get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes."
CNBC's Becky Quick noted that Perkins had said "a lot of questionable things," to put it mildly. To which Fiorina responded: "Well, this is one of the reasons why Tom Perkins and I had disagreements in the boardroom, Becky."
Okay, so you typically disagree with the guy you cited as endorsing your run for president. Hmm.
Head below the fold for some fact checking on Fiorina's claim that "every single policy of President Obama has been demonstratively bad for women."
In fact, Fiorina's full statement was a jab at Hillary Clinton.
It is the height of hypocrisy for Mrs. Clinton to talk about being the first woman president, when every single policy she espouses and every single policy of President Obama has been demonstratively bad for women. Ninety-two percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama's first term belonged to women.
It's a claim that Mittens Romney also made in 2012. While it is true that women accounted for 683,000 of the 740,000 job losses between Jan. 2009 and March 2012—or 92 percent—it doesn't take into account the fact that the economic death spiral known as the Great Recession actually began in 2007, during George W. Bush's presidency.
The job losses hit men first and much harder, but jobs also started coming back to them sooner and stronger. So, in total, in the run-up to the 2012 election when Romney first used the statistic, 5 million jobs were lost since the start of the recession, of which 1.8 million were held by women. But many of the job losses by men occurred before Obama came to office, while women were in the middle of their heaviest job losses after he was sworn in.
Nothing like blaming Obama and Clinton for a problem that began seven years into George W. Bush's presidency using numbers that don't quite add up.