Carly Fiorina's big selling point as a presidential candidate—besides that having a woman attack Hillary Clinton looks better for the Republican Party—is her executive experience and the fiscal responsibility that supposedly implies. But
the unpaid bills she left behind for years after her losing 2010 Senate campaign are a reminder of how shaky those claims are. When her campaign pollster died a month before Election Day, Fiorina lavished praise on him and offered condolences to his widow:
But records show there was something that Fiorina did not offer his widow: Shumate’s last paycheck, for at least $30,000. It was one of more than 30 invoices, totaling about $500,000, that the multimillionaire didn’t settle — even as Fiorina reimbursed herself nearly $1.3 million she lent the campaign. She finally cleared most of the balance in January, a few months before announcing her run for president. [...]
Those who waited the longest to be paid were small businesses with a few dozen employees who did the grunt work of the campaign: building stages, sending out mailers, selling polling data. And at least one is still waiting.
While Fiorina tries to shed her image as a job killer who laid off thousands of workers, she might want to talk to her former staffers about quotes like this:
“People are just upset and angry and throwing her under the bus,” said Jon Cross, Fiorina’s operations director for her Senate campaign. “If we didn’t win, why do you deserve to get paid? If you don’t succeed in business, you shouldn’t be the first one to step up and complain about getting paid.”
So the small business that printed and mailed a flyer designed by a political consultant somewhere else shouldn't be paid because Carly Fiorina ran a losing campaign? Because Carly Fiorina failed to do the fundraising she needed to do and wasted money on ineffective advertising and elaborate stages for her own speeches?
The story of Fiorina 2010 should be a warning to everyone doing business with Fiorina 2016, and to voters who are inclined to believe that if she led a major company, she's a good and responsible manager. (Although really, everything about Fiorina's tenure at Hewlett-Packard should be a warning about her management abilities.)