Carly Fiorina: ‘I’m kind of used to being underestimated’

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is shrugging off early polling that shows her well back among the 2016 GOP pack and is defending her record as the technology company’s former chief executive.

“A couple months ago, I was nowhere in the polls. I’m not a professional politician, so I don’t have the same name recognition — that’s just a fact,” Ms. Fiorina, who declared a presidential run on Monday, said Tuesday on “Fox and Friends.” “Secondly, I started out as a secretary as you may know, so I’m kind of used to being underestimated — [it’s] the story of my life.”

But at least one online provocateur is trying to turn Ms. Fiorina’s business experience into a liability. On the website carlyfiorina.org, someone notes that she failed to register the domain, so they’re going to tell the public how many people she laid off at Hewlett-Packard. The message is followed by a series of frowny face emoticons and a note that the number is 30,000.

“Third, the thing about business, unlike politics, is business has facts in it. Numbers in it,” Ms. Fiorina said. “And so my track record at Hewlett-Packard is very clear. Together with the people of that great company, we took a business during the worst technology recession in 25 years — the Nasdaq [has] only now recovered, you may recall, after 15 years — we took a company and doubled it in size, almost 90 billion, we took the growth rate from 2 percent to 9 percent, we tripled the rate of innovation to 11 patents a day, we took it from a market laggard to a market leader in every product category, and yes indeed we grew jobs, because we transformed a company that was falling behind and failing to one that was growing and succeeding.”