Carly Fiorina’s campaign points out that she has taken 314 more questions from the press than Hillary Clinton has since their respective presidential campaign announcements.
Fiorina has answered 322 questions since last Monday according to a memo from her team, while, as Politico noted last week, Clinton has responded to just eight questions since launching her campaign on April 12.
“Unlike Hillary Clinton, I am not afraid to answer questions about my track record or my accomplishments or my principles,” Fiorina said on the stump and in the memo.
Fiorina needs the press attention in order to make an underdog bid for the GOP nomination. Hillary Clinton is in a very different position, as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Clinton’s campaign argues that she talks to voters, but Politico observed that “many of the people asking the questions at these events were preselected by the campaign or the group hosting the campaign.”
#related#Clinton’s strategy may be working, but so, it seems, is Fiorina’s. At the South Carolina Freedom Summit on Saturday, Fiorina didn’t shy away from her record as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, touting herself as having played a key role in keeping HP afloat through the dot-com bust, before directly addressing her messy exit from the company.
“I was fired in a boardroom brawl,” Fiorina told the crowd. “One of the things I know is that leaders challenge the status quo. And there are people who fight to preserve the status quo and those who fight to preserve the status quo become the enemies of those who fight to change the system.” With that, she’d turned her firing into an applause line.
The audience liked Fiorina, but one moment stood out. “If you want to help me, please go on to carlyforpresident.com and sign up and sign on.” This was a standard request for anyone, especially an underdog in need of grassroots support. The seven seconds of applause that followed? Not so standard.
— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.