There was a lifeless echo inside the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, where the three major Republican candidates were squaring off in their only face-to-face debate of the 2010 U.S. Senate primary campaign in California.
The audience was subdued, and Carly Fiorina’s microphone kept emitting the cringe-inducing squeak that often plagues low-budget audio production.
Primary Day was just over a month away, and incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer looked vulnerable in what was going to be an especially tough year for Democrats nationwide.
Just a few days earlier, Sarah Palin — who was then at the height of her influence in GOP primary politics — had endorsed Fiorina’s candidacy. But the former Hewlett-Packard CEO still trailed in the polls behind former U.S. Rep. Tom Campbell; and Chuck DeVore, an Orange County Assemblyman, was getting significant backing from conservative blogs and other right-leaning groups.
If she was going to earn the right to take on Boxer in November, Fiorina would have to stand out.
Her microphone may not have been functioning very well, but Fiorina was nonetheless in her element for most of the debate, even if she wasn’t quite shining.
With nary an extraneous “um” or “ah” to be found amid her machinegun-fire delivery, she was as relentless in making her points as she was polished in hammering “career politicians” like Boxer and her Republican opponents for “mischaracterizing” her own words.
Still, the debate’s atmospherics — which harkened back to local access TV — were hindering Fiorina’s efforts to channel fully the anger of the Tea Party moment that was driving Republican politics at the time.
Finally, near the debate’s conclusion, she found her opportunity to really stand out when the moderator tossed out a somewhat unusual question.
“Should people on the no-fly watch list be allowed to purchase a gun?” he asked, giving each of the candidates an opportunity to answer.
Campbell, the longtime fixture of California politics and a legal scholar with Harvard pedigree, was the first to respond.
“No,” he said with a chuckle, as if the answer to such an absurd question should have been self-evident.
Next it was DeVore’s turn. “Yes, if they haven’t been convicted of a felony,” the Tea Party favorite said to the surprise of few who were familiar with his hardline stances.
Fiorina answered last.
“Yes,” she said.
At first she left it at that. But appearing stunned, Campbell wasn’t ready to let that go.
“My goodness,” the GOP frontrunner said, all but clutching at his imaginary pearls.
DeVore attempted to interject and press the point. “That’s why it’s called the Second Amendment, To—"
But with impeccable timing, Fiorina cut off her likeminded rival with a characteristic wave of her head, which roughly mimics the motion required to keep a hula spinning around one’s neck.
“That’s why Tom Campbell has kind of a poor rating from the National Rifle Association right there,” she said.
Appearing even more incredulous than he was before, Campbell stammered out another, “My goodness.”
"I can't believe what I'm hearing," he added. "Wait until you're off the no-fly list, then exercise your Second Amendment rights! That is not an infringement on anyone's Second Amendment rights, and it seems somewhat unusual to take that position, except perhaps in a Republican primary."
Once again, DeVore tried to interject himself into the fight, to no avail. This was the Carly Fiorina show, and no one was going to stand in the way once she branded her rhetorical firearm.
“As we know, the no-fly list has been, unfortunately, way too large,” she said. “And I know people who have been on it, who’ve been stopped, and if we permit anyone who’s on that no-fly list to have their Second Amendment rights taken away from them, that’s a terrible problem. You’re seeing [another] issue where Tom Campbell is far too close to Barbara Boxer for my taste.”
The exchange was vintage Fiorina: self-certain to the extreme, theatrical and at least a little bit patronizing toward her unfortunate opponent.
She carried her unyielding disposition to a blowout victory over Campbell and DeVore in that year’s primary campaign, and she has used it to even stronger effect during her steep rise into the top tier of Republican presidential contenders this year.
In the intervening years before her surprisingly strong White House bid got off the ground, Fiorina was best remembered in the political realm for her Fred Davis-produced “demon sheep” web ad that was directed against Campbell.
If it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, do yourself a favor and watch it again. To this day, the “demon sheep” spot holds up as one of the most aggressively bizarre hallucinations that an attention-seeking underdog campaign has ever deigned to put on the Internet.
But largely forgotten was that there was a time when Fiorina had a plausible path to becoming a United States senator.
In the summer and early autumn of 2010, the Boxer campaign fretted privately about the incumbent’s vulnerability, knowing from its own research just how angry swing voters in the state were with long-serving incumbents amid a flagging economy and stagnation in Washington.
And as Election Day approached, California Democrats increasingly saw Fiorina as a real threat to win the race. Only a brutally negative campaign against her, they concluded, would be enough for the incumbent to hang onto her seat.
And that is just what the Boxer camp orchestrated to great effect.
Nonetheless, Fiorina’s first political campaign is instructive when looking at how she’s running her second one. In short, not much has changed in her relentless approach, which is once again turning many observers skeptical about her viability into believers, even as she again plays fast and loose with the facts at times.
Boxer herself has professed to being shocked that Fiorina even entered the presidential fray, and she is not the only one who felt that way. After all, a campaign for the nation’s highest office is not typically the next step for someone who was fired from her last job and failed at her first attempt at winning political office on the state level.
To this day, however, Boxer’s campaign team remains complimentary of the way in which Fiorina was able to command the arena from the moment she announced her candidacy in late 2009.
“Carly Fiorina was a great performer in 2010,” Rose Kapolcyznski, who managed Boxer’s campaign, told The Huffington Post. “Her problem was the product she was trying to sell, but Fiorina was very comfortable on stage. She had a very sharp edge to her comments from the very beginning … the biting comment as a putdown was a specialty of hers.”
The specialty has also served Fiorina well in this campaign, whether it’s been her cutting attacks on Hillary Clinton’s leadership at the State Department, frequent shots at Donald Trump’s ostentatiousness, or even the occasionally understated retort to an opponent’s cheap shot that uses a paucity of words to their fullest effect.
Back in 2010, the Boxer camp was especially impressed with the self-possessed and energetic manner in which Fiorina — who built her business career on the strength of her skills as a salesperson — carried herself, considering that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer in early 2009 and had finished chemotherapy just before getting into the race.
“She had very little hair, which for anyone is an uncomfortable situation,” Kapolcyznski said. “You’re in recovery, you don’t look the way you’ve looked, and all of that. And she decides she had to get into the race and just pulled it off with supreme confidence.”
Fiorina spent $5.5 million of her own money on the race but was ultimately outspent by a significant margin by Boxer and Democratic-allied groups.
In the end, California’s staunchly Democratic electorate proved too difficult an obstacle for Fiorina to overcome, and Boxer went on to defeat Fiorina by a comfortable 10-point margin in the general election.
Fiorina did, however, come closer to beating Boxer than California’s Republican gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman — who spent a record-shattering $140 million of her own money — did to defeating Democrat Jerry Brown, even though the governor’s race was widely considered the more competitive of the two in the months leading up to Election Day.
“Carly has shown again and again that she is a leader who will stand against the status quo,” Fiorina’s deputy presidential campaign manager Sarah Isgur Flores told HuffPost. “She forced the Democrats to spend $30 million to defend what they thought was a safe seat, which was money they couldn’t spend on other races that cycle. President Obama was forced to fly out four times, and Barbara Boxer called it the toughest, hardest fight of her career. Carly was proud she ran on conservative values because it was a fight worth having.”
Fiorina is most comfortable on the attack — a skill set that has served her extraordinarily well in the two presidential debates that largely have propelled her over the last couple of months. It’s a strength that she has proven particularly adept at exploiting to a Republican electorate desperate to find a candidate who can win next November.
“Wherever I am on your list — whether you’re already totally sold, or I’m in your top two or three — go ahead and admit it that in your heart of hearts, every one of you wants to see me debate Hillary Clinton,” she said during a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire.
One of the most common criticisms of Fiorina the politician, both then and now, centers on her occasional tendency to say what she thinks will be most effective first, and worry about the accuracy of her comments later.
For example, in an effort to bolster her national security credentials during the 2010 primary race, Fiorina had repeatedly cited her unpaid tenure on the Defense Business Board, an organization that works to streamline the Pentagon’s bureaucracy.
Something about this resume bullet point sounded fishy to DeVore’s campaign, which filed a Freedom of Information Act request and discovered that Fiorina had missed the majority of the board’s meetings at the time when she was serving on it during the latter years of George W. Bush’s presidency.
During a radio debate, DeVore — who served in the Defense Department during the Reagan administration — confronted Fiorina with this spotty attendance record.
She took immediate exception to his challenge.
“You don’t attempt to describe the whole story,” Firoina said, her voice rising in indignation. “Of course, I was battling cancer last year and unable to travel.”
She had indeed been battling cancer the previous year. But in fact, the meetings that Fiorina had missed actually took place in 2007 and January of 2008 — over a year before she was diagnosed. Once she mentioned her illness, however, this was no longer an argument DeVore was willing to contest.
Fast forward to one of the most memorable moments of the Republican presidential debate at the Reagan Library earlier this month, when a fuming Fiorina challenged Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to sit down and view the secretly recorded Planned Parenthood videotapes, which she described in the following manner: “Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says, 'We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’”
As several fact-checking organizations and media outlets have since pointed out, the scene that she described was not, in fact, what the edited Planned Parenthood videos showed.
Surely, Fiorina would apologize — or at least recalibrate her comments to more accurately reflect the source of the video she had watched, right?
Not a chance.
Instead, Fiorina doubled down, telling Fox News’ Chris Wallace on Sunday that she indeed had personally viewed the nonexistent Planned Parenthood video that she had described at the debate.
“No, I don’t accept that at all,” she said in response to Wallace’s attempt to give her an out. “I’ve seen the footage and I find it amazing actually that all these supposed fact-checkers in the mainstream media claim this doesn’t exist.”
Savvy politicians will often give an inch in order to take a yard later. That wasn’t Fiorina’s style during her 2010 Senate run, and it isn’t her style now.
There may come a moment in one of the upcoming debates when one of her current political rivals calls her out more immediately and effectively than the last ones did.
In the meantime, don’t expect Carly Fiorina to fade from the forefront of the 2016 conversation.