Union sponsors new anti-Carly Fiorina video; Fiorina fights back with own video called “Truth”
By Caroline Lochhead at SF Gate
Brave New Films and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor has a new video out tying Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina to California’s high unemployment rate, interviewing several of the 30,000 former Hewlett Packard workers who were laid off during her tenure there from 1999 to 2005.
Fiorina’s campaign is fighting back back with its own video, called “Truth.” It quotes former Intel chief Craig Barrett, a big Fiorina fan, and has former H-P manager Vince Blecha asking, “What would Barbara Boxer have done? Would she have just raised product prices so we could cut even more jobs? She had to adhere to a budget. She couldn’t just spend her way out of problems.”
Brave New Films Hammers Carly Fiorina
Brave New Films, the documentary film company behind a series of damaging anti-McCain viral videos in the 2008 presidential campaign, has put its sights on Carly Fiorina, the Republican candidate for Senate in California.
In the latest of three videos attacking Ms. Fiorina that the company has released since July, several former Hewlett-Packard employees who say they were laid off during Ms. Fiorina’s tenure as chief executive of the company describe her as ruthless and extravagant.
Documentary Film Company Takes On Fiorina
By Janie Lorber at The New York Times
Brave New Films, the documentary film company behind a series of damaging anti-McCain viral videos in the 2008 presidential campaign, has put its sights on Carly Fiorina, the Republican candidate for Senate in California.
In the latest of three videos attacking Ms. Fiorina that the company has released since July, several former Hewlett-Packard employees who say they were laid off during Ms. Fiorina’s tenure as chief executive of the company describe her as ruthless and extravagant.
The video, which asserts that the workers are among 30,000 whose jobs were shipped overseas when she ran the company, comes as dozens of candidates in both parties run campaign advertisements criticizing their opponents for supporting policies that encourage outsourcing American jobs.
A spokeswoman from Ms. Fiorina’s campaign said the company had a history of distorting the facts. ”This group has consistently made misleading videos,” Andrea Saul, the spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.
Indeed, the group’s first film linking Ms. Fiorina to the The Tea Party splices footage of Ms. Fiorina addressing a Tea Party crowd with shots of angry Tea Partiers calling President Obama a communist at a rally that her spokeswoman said Ms. Fiorina did not even attend.
Robert Greenwald, who founded the California-based production company in 2005, says the state’s Senate race between Senator Barbara Boxer, a three-term Democratic incumbent, and Ms. Fiorina, a Tea Party-backed political neophyte, is emblematic of the choice that voters face around the country.
“There are clear alternatives,” Mr. Greenwald said. “There are substantive differences of opinion. We aren’t talking about some ridiculous character flaw — it’s about the fundamental direction of the country.”
Mr. Greenwald made his first big political splash in the 2008 presidential campaign with a series of films that, among other things, shed light on Mr. McCain’s real estate holdings and highlighted his relationship with a conservative evangelical leader who’d made harsh statements about Islam. That was the company’s first foray into electoral politics, and though Brave New Films is undeniably liberal in orientation, it still does not claim to support a party or endorse particular candidates.
The other videos in the latest series — entitled “The Real Carly” — focus on her ties to the Tea Party and her stance on immigration, including her support for the tough new law in Arizona.
Iraq address offers chance for president to reach out to left
By The Hill
President Obama has an opportunity Tuesday night to remind his supporters on the left of a time when they were all on the same page, united in opposition to George W. Bush and his war in Iraq.
Obama’s highly anticipated Oval Office address on the end of combat operations in Iraq, which he said earlier on Tuesday would not be a “victory lap,” comes at a perilous moment for his presidency, but could serve as a reminder to liberals that they once rallied around Obama as the man who would bring the war to an end.
The liberal anti-war crowd that propelled Obama to the White House is disenchanted with a president they see as compromising on too many issues, including the Iraq war.
That’s led to worry for Democrats, who fear motivated Republican voters will come to the polls in droves this fall as the left stays home. Such a scenario could cost Obama’s party control of the House.
Tuesday’s address is a moment for Obama to present himself as an effective leader fulfilling the promise his 2008 campaign was built upon, especially to the increasingly impatient liberal anti-war crowd.
Carly No Es Mi Amiga (Carly Fiornia Is Not My Friend)
By Kevin Bondelli at Future Majority
Carly No Es Mi Amiga (Carly Fiornia Is Not My Friend)
We Don’t Want Carly to bring racial profiling to California! Through Carly Fiorina’s fierce support of SB 1070 and racial profiling in Arizona one thing is clear, Carly is no friend of Latinos in California and Latinos everywhere. Help spread the word about Carly Fiorina’s REAL views on Immigration and together we can stop the potential spread of racial profiling to California.
http://youtu.be/0m2uLSR52N8
California Latino Voters Say Fiorina ‘No Es Mi Amiga’
By Mike Hall at AFL-CIO Now Blog
Carly Fiorina, California Republican U.S. Senate candidate, shares a wide range of skewed views straight out of the Sarah Palin manifesto. But there is one key Palinesque policy she embraces that she’d just a soon the state’s Latino voters didn’t dwell on.
Fiorina, who casts herself as friend of Latinos, is a strong and strident supporter of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law that civil rights groups denounce as discriminatory and an open to door to racial profiling. As a U.S. senator, Fiorina very well could back a national anti-immigrant law patterned after Arizona’s.
Today the California Labor Federation, Brave New Films and SEIU California unveiled a new bilingual video, “Carly No Es Mi Amiga” (Carly is Not My Friend) that exposes her anti-immigrant agenda and close ties to Palin’s radical and inflammatory immigration rhetoric. Says Art Pulaski, California Labor Federation executive secretary-treasurer:
She’s pushing more of the same failed policies that destroyed our economy and forced millions of Latinos and other workers into the unemployment line. The last thing California Latinos need is Carly’s anti-immigrant, job-slashing agenda.
Brave New Films also will launch an integrated “Carly No Es Mi Amiga” online campaign which will include Facebook ads for California voters and the Latino community. It’s part of a full “Real Carly” campaign. Click here.
There are more reasons why Fiorina is no friend to Latino voters–read them here in the latest post from Rebecca Greenberg at the California Labor Federation’s blog, Labor’s Edge.
Boxer, Fiorina likely to go negative in debate
By Joe Garofolie at San Francisco Chronicle
Debate season for California’s major political candidates begins Wednesday in Moraga, with a televised U.S. Senate matchup at St. Mary’s College between Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and Republican Carly Fiorina.
Ordinarily, debates are a chance for office-seekers to outline what they would do if elected. Don’t bet on that this year. So far, it has been far easier to bash the opponent.
With voter frustration – and the state’s 12.3 percent unemployment rate – boiling, candidates are finding it simpler to say what they won’t do instead of what they will. Going negative, in short, chops down an opponent’s poll numbers quicker than going positive builds an office-seeker’s ratings.
Analysts say the negative strategy is unlikely to stop when Fiorina and Boxer tangle for an hour beginning at 7 p.m. Wednesday. Republican Meg Whitman and Democrat Jerry Brown begin a series of three gubernatorial debates starting later in September.
Better response
From recent research he’s seen, Democratic pollster Ben Tulchin concluded voters respond more when candidates attack than when they express positive messages.
“(Negativity) is working,” said Tulchin, a San Francisco strategist who is advising San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s campaign for lieutenant governor. “The voters are in such a foul mood that, quite frankly, a negative message is working better than a positive message.”
In her 25-minute speech to the California Republican Party this month, first-time candidate Fiorina mentioned “Barbara Boxer” 21 times. However, she didn’t once mention Hewlett-Packard, the Silicon Valley company where she served as CEO until she was fired in 2005.
That was a slightly slower opponent-name-dropping pace than that set by GOP gubernatorial candidate, and fellow first-time office-seeker, Whitman. Whitman dropped 21 mentions of Democratic opponent Brown in her 20-minute convention speech, with scarcely a shout-out to eBay, which she helmed as CEO for 10 years until 2008. While she has run positive advertisements linked to her eBay tenure, she also has repeatedly pounded Brown in other ads as a “failed” politician.
“Just saying ‘Barbara Boxer’ and ‘Jerry Brown’ is like throwing red meat to the audience at a Republican convention. And it helps because neither (Fiorina nor Whitman) have a long-term relationship with that crowd,” said Adam Probolsky, an Orange County pollster and strategist for Republican candidates.
Plus, with Boxer and Brown being longtime officeholders it stokes “the broad anger toward government that we haven’t seen in a long time,” Probolsky said.
Fiorina repeats Boxer’s name because 52 percent of voters now hold a negative view of the three-term senator, according to a July Field Poll, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a policy and politics fellow at the University of Southern California – and a veteran observer of California politics.
The nation hasn’t seen this level of voter anger since the Republican congressional takeover in 1994 or the youth-led Democratic Party uprisings in 1968, she said.
But that anger isn’t provoking a substantive discussion of the problems facing California.