8 Stories Ted Cruz Should Probably Have Read Before Picking Carly Fiorina

Did he know all this when he decided she’d be a good vice president?

Mark J. Terrill/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz will name former Hewlett-Packard CEO and Republican primary rival Carly Fiorina as his running mate on Wednesday afternoon, multiple outlets have reported.

Fiorina left the race in February, on the heels of poor numbers at the polls—and many stories about her shoddy business record and her propensity for stretching the truth. Now that she’s back in the race, let’s take a stroll down Fiorina memory lane:

Can a CEO Who Laid Off Thousands, Botched a Merger, and Left With $21 Million Become President?: At the heart of Fiorina’s leadership experience is her time as the CEO of HP, from 1999 to 2005. But under her watch, the company lost millions of dollars and enacted a merger with Compaq that has widely been deemed a corporate failure.

Carly Fiorina Makes a Lot of Stuff Up About Everything“: From discussions of her chummy relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin to HP’s alleged violations of the Iran embargo, we put together a nonexhaustive list of Fiorina’s embellishments.

Fiorina Super-PAC Makes Its Own Abortion Video“: After Fiorina described a grisly abortion video during a GOP debate in September, multiple media outlets pointed out that the video didn’t exist. In response, her super-PAC created a version of the previously nonexistent video.

Carly Fiorina’s Fact-Defying Stump Speech“: Fiorina dropped several shocking statistics during a campaign speech in Iowa. Among other dubious claims, she said that in the previous year 307,000 veterans had died before they received health care from the Department of Veterans Affairs and that the tax code is 73,000 pages. We fact-checked the numbers.

Fact-Checking Carly Fiorina on Women’s Job Losses Under Obama“: Here are more surprising stats trumpeted by the former presidential candidate, and more fact-checking showing that her numbers don’t add up.

Carly Fiorina Isn’t Just Attacking Planned Parenthood at the Debates“: While her presidential campaign was in full swing, Fiorina recorded a robocall that was blasted throughout California encouraging voters to support a ballot measure that would require parental notification before an underage girl can terminate a pregnancy. The measure has been a main goal of California’s anti-abortion advocates for the past decade, and fighting it on ballot after ballot has drained Planned Parenthood’s money and time for years.

Little Did These Adorable Kids Know That Carly Fiorina Was Using Them as Anti-Abortion Props“: On her way into an anti-abortion rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Fiorina stumbled upon a group of four- and five-year-olds on a field trip to a botanical garden. Fiorina ushered the kids onto the stage of the rally, where they sat at her feet while she gave a speech—against the backdrop of an enormous photo of a fetus. 

Carly Fiorina Creates a Whole New Debate Technique“: When faced with a tough debate question, Fiorina got pretty creative. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate