Signaling a combative round in the California U.S. Senate contest, Republican Carly Fiorina on Thursday defended her new attack ad on "millionaire" U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, charging that the Democrat has consistently tried to "play class warfare" on the issues.
Fiorina's online spot, "Failure," characterizes Boxer as a wealthy career politician. "Since she went to Washington, her taxpayer-funded salary has more than doubled," the ad says. "She has become a millionaire. And members of her family profit off her special-interest-backed political committees."
The third-term senator, who is paid $174,000 a year, has listed her blind trust as having a value of between $1 million and $5 million, according to Senate financial disclosure forms. Boxer, on the stump and in her TV ads, has consistently charged that Fiorina laid off 30,000 workers while earning a multimillion-dollar salary as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. But Fiorina has said Boxer has accepted contributions from other executives who have laid off workers.
Barbara Boxer unleashed a forceful attack on Carly Fiorina on Thursday – a purely negative ad noting that, as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, the Republican nominee for Senate laid off 30,000 workers, shipped jobs to China, tripled her own salary, bought a million-dollar yacht and five corporate jets.
Kaboom. That’s nasty. Especially because the charges are based in fact and the star of the ad is Hurricane Carly herself, defending the “massive layoffs” she implemented at H-P. And the kicker slogan is killer: “Carly Fiorina – outsourcing jobs, out for herself.”
You can’t get too much more negative than that, unless you were to accuse her of personally stealing Christmas from the crippled children of jobless workers.
But as Calbuzz always says: an election is not a tea party. Negative is fair, if it’s true.
