WASHINGTON -- Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina woke up Thursday morning to arguments that her performance the night before, during CNBC's primary debate, wasn't without fact errors.
The Washington Post noted that Fiorina's assertion that 92 percent of the jobs lost during President Barack Obama's first term belonged to women was a recycled charge from Mitt Romney's campaign in 2012. Politifact had ruled that claim "mostly false" when the Romney staff touted it.
Politifact reported at the time:
One could reasonably argue that January 2009 employment figures are more a result of President George W. Bush’s policies, at least as far as any president can be blamed or credited for private-sector hiring.
We reached out to Gary Steinberg, spokesman for the BLS (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), for his take on the claim. He pointed out that women’s job losses are high for that period of time because millions of men had already lost their jobs. Women were next.
Other economists also discredited the claim. Politifact added that "timing was important. And if you count all those jobs lost beginning in 2007, women account for just 39.7 percent of the total."
Appearing on CNN Tuesday morning, Fiorina was asked about the Washington Post report. "This is the same conversation we had after the last debate," she said. "Everybody came out and said I was using wrong data -- no, I’m not using wrong data."
As Fiorina alluded, the Fiorina fact-check has become a post-debate ritual as reporters have found her statements from previous debates (and speeches) to range from widely inaccurate to mild whitewashing, finding holes in everything from her attacks against Planned Parenthood to her retelling of her own biography and performance while CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
During a GOP primary debate last month, Fiorina reported what she claimed to have seen in a Planned Parenthood video: "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.'" This turned out to be utterly false.
When the CNN anchor attempted to bring up the Planned Parenthood issue, Fiorina cut her off.
"This has been hashed and rehashed," she said. "Is there no other issue of economic import to the middle class in the United States of America that you’d like to talk about this morning?"