New York Times reporter Amy Chozick again played human shield on behalf of Hillary Clinton against attacks by potential Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina: "With Pointed Attacks, Getting Into Position as Party’s Foil to Clinton."
Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, ran against Sen. Barbara Boxer in California in 2010 and is a possible Republican presidential contender in 2016. Also, she's unfair and "harsh" to Hillary Clinton, according to Chozick's profile on Saturday:
She has been the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, a senior adviser to a Republican presidential nominee and a candidate for the United States Senate. But Carly Fiorina recently took on her boldest role yet: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s loudest critic.
Over the past few weeks, Ms. Fiorina has mocked Mrs. Clinton’s globe-trotting as secretary of state, assailed Mrs. Clinton’s use of only a private email account to do official business, and even accused Mrs. Clinton of stealing intellectual property. From her. Twice.
Ms. Fiorina insists she has no problem with Mrs. Clinton personally -- only with her liberal philosophy and policies, and what she dismisses as an unimpressive record on getting things done.
“Like Hillary Clinton, I too, have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles around the globe, but unlike her, I have actually accomplished something,” she told conservatives in Iowa in January. “Mrs. Clinton: Flying is an activity, not an accomplishment.”
....
Ms. Fiorina easily sticks out among the wide field of possible Republican contenders for president: Most of the others are white men. But what has distinguished her most so far, aside from her gender, is not her private-sector experience or her pro-market policies, but her increasingly pointed attacks on Mrs. Clinton.
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Allies of Mrs. Clinton, who plans to make gender a central part of her appeal, call this a cynical ploy. Ms. Fiorina, they say, is being put to use by a Republican Party that is desperate to damage Mrs. Clinton without antagonizing female voters.
Chozick wrote a sarcastic version of this same defense in January, and vividly highlighed her article on her Twitter feed as exposing "The cottage industry of Hillary hating...."
In Saturday's paper, she ruthlessly hunted down one of Fiorina's rather mild "attacks," taking a research dive and quoting a snarky liberal website to prove how wrong Fiorina was in one of her unfair attacks.
Some of Ms. Fiorina’s lines of attack seem less high-minded.
She accused Mrs. Clinton, whose most recent memoir is “Hard Choices,” of copying the title of her own 2006 memoir, “Tough Choices.” An aide to Ms. Fiorina posted an image on Twitter of the two book jackets side by side.
And last month, after Mrs. Clinton urged 5,000 female tech professionals in Silicon Valley to “unlock our full potential,” Ms. Fiorina again accused Mrs. Clinton of stealing: Her leadership political action committee, an aide to Ms. Fiorina noted, is called the Unlocking Potential Project. And next weekend she will kick off an Unlocking Potential conference, with the tagline “From Hometowns to Washington: How Women Across America Can Create Real Conservative Change.”
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton declined to comment, but Ms. Fiorina came in for some derision on The Huffington Post, which recounted the tussle under the headline “Overused Management Bromide Now the Exclusive Property of Carly Fiorina, Apparently.”
A Nexis search identified 618 uses of the phrase “unlocking potential” in news articles in the past year.
Though Fiorina advised John McCain in 2008 and ran for Senate two years later, Chozick called her a mere dabbler in politics.
Her business career ended a few years later in one of the more notorious flameouts in modern corporate history. After orchestrating a merger with Compaq that was then widely seen as a failure, she was ousted in 2005.
Still, Ms. Fiorina received more than $21 million in severance, and she began to dabble in politics. In 2008 she advised Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee. Two years later, Ms. Fiorina challenged Senator Barbara Boxer of California, but lost by 10 percentage points. “We gained a lot of Republican votes,” she said, but her campaign could not compete with the Democratic get-out-the-vote effort in California.
Chozick was pretty good at attacking Fiorina herself.
She also left behind nearly $500,000 in campaign debt and several unhappy political consultants. The San Francisco Chronicle called Ms. Fiorina the “deadbeat presidential candidate,” a characterization the newspaper later took back....
