Carly Fiorina’s newly announced presidential campaign got off on the wrong foot Monday, thanks to an oversight involving a domain bearing her name.
As visitors discovered Monday, the domain name “carlyfiorina.org” isn’t registered to Fiorina or her campaign. Instead, it’s registered to a Firorina critic who has chosen to use the URL to highlight the 30,000 jobs she cut while serving as CEO of Hewlett-Packard during the 2000s.
The Web site features some 30,000 frowning faced emoticons underneath which is written: “That’s 30,000 people she laid off. People with families.” Then it takes a line from a 2005 interview with Fiorina in which she talked about her thoughts on those layoffs.
“I would have done them all faster,” the site quotes Fiornia as saying.
The site also has a “bonus page,” where visitors can see a “demon” sheep along with the admonition to not hover a mouse pointer over it. Moving a mouse pointer over the image causes the sheep’s eyes to turn red.
The demon sheep is a reference to a widely mocked political ad Fiorina ran when she was a candidate for Senate in 2010. In that ad, she tried to portray Tom Campbell, her rival for the Republican nomination, as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, one that had glowing red eyes.
It’s likely Fiorina would like to be talking about other things, namely her presidential aspirations. The former Senate candidate announced Monday that she is running for president via a video on her actual Web site, carlyforpresident.com.
“We know the only way to reimagine our government is to reimagine who is leading it,” Fiorina said in the video.
On her Web site, Fiorina portrays herself as a problem solver and a person who is standing up against the “political class.” She also tries to put a positive spin on her tenure at H-P, which ended in her firing in 2005.
“Carly didn’t always make the most popular decisions at H-P but, time and time again, they would prove to be the right ones,” her site states.
Fiorina is only the latest presidential hopeful to get tripped up by a familiar-looking domain name. Visitors to “tedcruz.com” will see a message urging them to “support President Obama;” the official domain for Cruz’s presidential campaign is tedcruz.org. Similarly, visitors to jebbushforpresident.com will see a site run by two gay men. Bush hasn’t actually announced a presidential run, despite wide expectations that he will do so, and doesn’t yet have an official site.
File photo of Fiorina. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
