Ex-CEO Fiorina enters GOP field, hits at Clinton

FILE - In this April 18, 2015 file photo, Carly Fiorina speaks at the Republican Leadership Summit in Nashua, N.H.  The former technology executive formally entered the 2016 presidential race on Monday.  (AP Photo/Jim Cole)
FILE - In this April 18, 2015 file photo, Carly Fiorina speaks at the Republican Leadership Summit in Nashua, N.H. The former technology executive formally entered the 2016 presidential race on Monday. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)

Former Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Carly Fiorina said Monday that she will seek to become the United States' first female president, joining a crowded field for the Republican presidential nomination.

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"Yes, I am running for president," Fiorina said on ABC's Good Morning America, adding she'd be the best person for the job because she understands how the economy and the world work.

The primary race already includes three U.S. senators who have announced their candidacies: Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson joined the race Sunday, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is expected to make his announcement on the race today.

Later this week, Fiorina is set to speak at a TechCrunch event in New York, then swing through the key early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, spokesman Anna Epstein said.

Fiorina, who never has held elected office, served as an executive at AT&T and Lucent before assuming the leadership role at HP, then America's largest computer-maker, in 1999.

That business experience, along with her leading role at a number of charitable organizations, will serve as a centerpiece of a campaign likely to portray Fiorina as the antithesis of the career politician, and the only Republican who can neutralize Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton's advantage among women voters.

"Our founders never intended us to have a professional, political class," Fiorina said in a 60-second announcement video, which opens with a clip of Clinton announcing her run for the presidency. "We know the only way to re-imagine our government is to re-imagine who is leading it."

In her interview with ABC on Monday, Fiorina said she had "a lot of admiration" for Clinton but then pointed to her handling of an attack on a U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya; her use of private email as secretary of state; and donations from foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation.

"She has not been transparent about a whole set of things that matter," Fiorina said.

In the months leading up to her announcement, Fiorina, 60, routinely cited her corporate experience and lack of government jobs. "People who have been in politics all their lives are somewhat disconnected from the rest of us," she said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in April.

Her greatest corporate achievement -- her rise to lead one of the country's most-prominent technology companies -- is also something of an Achilles' heel, as the HP board ousted her in 2005. A merger with rival Compaq that Fiorina oversaw led to earnings stagnation, large-scale layoffs and a plunging stock price for HP.

During Fiorina's only attempt at seeking elected office, in the 2010 California U.S. Senate race, incumbent Barbara Boxer repeatedly criticized Fiorina's record at the company. Boxer ended up winning by double digits.

Fiorina noted Monday that she announced her Senate bid in California just a year before the election, even as she was recovering treatment for cancer.

"Nobody gave me a chance, I was nowhere in the polls," she said. "Seven months later, I won a three-way primary with 57 percent of the vote. "

Her low poll numbers could keep her out of the Republican debates when they begin in August, but Fiorina said she was "reasonably confident" she'd make the cut and appear on stage.

"There are a whole set of things that indicate momentum and interest, and I think we're generating that already," she said. "I think the polls will come along in due time, but I'm not particularly concerned about them."

In the months leading up to her presidential announcement, Fiorina worked to position herself as one of Clinton's fiercest critics, noting that her own gender offsets one of Clinton's perceived advantages.

"If Hillary Clinton were to face a [Republican] female nominee, there are a whole set of things that she won't be able to talk about," Fiorina said at the April Christian Science Monitor breakfast. "She won't be able to talk about being the first woman president. She won't be able to talk about a war on women without being challenged. She won't be able to play the gender card."

Politically, Fiorina is a small-government conservative who, like many in her party, favors a host of tax cuts. She has supported building the Keystone XL pipeline while opposing cap-and-trade measures meant to curb greenhouse gas emissions. A strong gun-rights supporter, Fiorina has criticized 1994's assault weapons ban.

Fiorina opposes abortion and favors overturning the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. She does, however, allow for exceptions in cases of rape or incest. On gay rights, she says she voted in 2008 in support of California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in the state until it was struck down in the courts. At the same time, she does favor civil unions and would extend government benefits to same-sex couples bound by them.

She charged Monday that President Barack Obama's administration has "made the world a more dangerous place." She called for arming Ukraine and sending weapons to Jordan to battle Islamic militants.

Fiorina touted her technology prowess, but that didn't prevent her fledgling campaign from making a tech mistake when it neglected to register the domain carlyfiorina.org. Someone else did and used the site to hammer Fiorina on the layoffs she oversaw during her tenure at Hewlett-Packard.

In 2008, Fiorina was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent chemotherapy, radiation therapy and a double mastectomy. Now cancer-free, she lives in northern Virginia with her second husband, Frank, a former AT&T executive whom she married in 1985.

The author of two memoirs, 2007's Hard Choices, and 2015's Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey, Fiorina was born in Austin, Texas, before going on to high school in London, England, and Durham, N.C. She holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy and medieval history from Stanford University, an MBA in marketing from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland-College Park, and a master's of science in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

In a field that could ultimately feature more than a dozen notable candidates, the Republican contest is considered wide open. It's also more diverse than it was four years ago.

Republicans acknowledge a pressing need to broaden the party's appeal beyond its traditional base of older, white men.

Fiorina is likely to be the only prominent woman to seek the GOP nomination, with Carson the only black.

"I'm probably never going to be politically correct because I'm not a politician," Carson declared at a formal announcement speech Monday in his native Detroit, where he was raised by a single mother in what he called dire poverty. To be sure, he's a politician now. But not, he said, like the others.

"It's time for people to rise up and take the government back," said Carson, a favorite of the GOP's Tea Party. "The political class won't like me saying things like that. The political class comes from both parties."

Carson rose from poverty and ultimately became the head of pediatric neurosurgery for close to three decades at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Children's Center. He gained stature in conservative politics after condemning Obama's health care law in front of the president at the 2013 national prayer breakfast.

Yet he has sometimes struggled under the glare of national politics.

Carson once suggested Obama's health care law is the worst thing since slavery, compared present-day America to Nazi Germany and described homosexuality as a personal choice.

Information for this article was contributed by David Knowles and Ben Brody of Bloomberg News; by Steve Peoples and Ed White of The Associated Press; by Amy Chozick of The New York Times; and by Lesley Clark of Tribune News Service.

A Section on 05/05/2015

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