Boxer predicts GOP won’t pick Fiorina

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) doesn’t think Republicans will pick Carly Fiorina as their 2016 presidential nominee.

“I don’t think anyone would put her on the ticket,” said Boxer, who defeated Fiorina when the Republican challenged her reelection bid in 2010.

{mosads}Boxer has done a string of interviews in recent days about Fiorina, who is moving up in the polls after a well-received debate performance last week. The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard placed second to Donald Trump in a CNN national poll released on Sunday.

That’s making her a bigger target for Democrats, and Boxer has been happy to deliver punches honed during the 2010 campaign.

Echoing some of the arguments made by Trump in last week’s debate, she called Fiorina a “mean-spirited” failure of a business leader in an interview with The Hill.

“While she was laying off workers and ruining the company … she was buying a yacht, corporate jet and all the rest,” Boxer said. “She was, at that time, the face of income inequality. And now, as we go into 2016 … she is the face of inequality.”

Boxer also doesn’t think Fiorina will be a good general-election candidate. She noted her victory in a landslide election year for the GOP, which won back the House in 2010 in the aftermath of ObamaCare’s passage.

“She was tested, in a Republican year, running against me, who was considered very vulnerable, and she was slaughtered,” Boxer said.

“Once I was able to tell the people the truth about her, it became a lot easier, and we won by 10 points, a million votes,” Boxer said.

In response to Boxer’s comments, Fiorina’s campaign hurled some strong words at her. “California has the highest poverty rates in the nation under Barbara Boxer’s policies,” said campaign spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores.

“As president, Carly will challenge the status quo that has crushed Americans under the weight and corruption of this government.”

Fiorina’s time at HP became a major point in the GOP race, with Trump at the debate saying he wouldn’t put her in charge of any of his companies.

HP lost more than half its value during Fiorina’s five-year tenure, and she was fired in 2005.

Amid the dot-com crash, the company laid off 30,000 workers under her watch and repeatedly failed to live up to profit and performance expectations. She orchestrated an acquisition of Compaq Computer Corp. that didn’t provide anywhere near the new profits she predicted.

Fiorina has argued that she made tough choices at HP’s helm that kept the company strong and saved thousands of jobs that would have otherwise been lost.

“I led Hewlett-Packard through a very difficult time, the worst technology recession in 25 years,” she said at last week’s debate. “Despite those difficult times, we doubled the size of the company, we quadrupled its topline growth rate, we quadrupled its cash flow, we tripled its rate of innovation.”

She’s also accused HP’s board of targeting her for disagreeing with them and challenging the status quo.

In her Senate race, Fiorina attracted national attention for her advertisements, including one during the GOP primary that compared her opponent, ex-Rep. Tom Campbell (R-Calif.), to a “demon sheep,” complete with illuminated red eyes.

Boxer and other California Democrats have been a target of Fiorina’s more recent criticisms, as she has blamed environmentalists and Gov. Jerry Brown for the state’s historic drought.

In August, Chuck Todd of NBC’s “Meet the Press” brought up the drought, saying climate change is making it worse.

“You know what else has made it worse?” she responded. “Politicians. Liberal politicians who stood up for forty years, as the population of California doubled, and said we could not build a new reservoir, and we cannot build a water conveyance system. So for forty years, 70 percent of the rainfall has washed out to sea. That’s pretty dumb when you know you’re going to have droughts every single year.”

Boxer, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, noted that Fiorina no longer lives in California and called her views on the state outdated.

“She left California, so apparently she doesn’t know what’s happening,” Boxer said. “We’re doing gangbusters. We’re creating jobs at a very rapid rate, our unemployment rate is going way down.”