Carly Fiorina’s former opponent, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), jumped on MSNBC after the GOP presidential debate to slam the former HP CEO as the Democrats’ ticket to the White House and to declare Hillary Clinton’s email scandal a “baloney sandwich.”
Boxer, an avowed Clinton supporter, said the former secretary of State “has the temperament, she has the toughness” to win.
“But I was right when I said on day one that, as soon as she announced, they would be going after her 24/7. So, you have had like more than a dozen of these Republican candidates going against her. You have got the Republican House going against her. And the media wants to knock her down because they want a race,” she said. “And she has proven that she can stay tough through all this. And this e-mail thing is so much a baloney sandwich. I can’t even begin to tell you.”
“I don’t know one senator, not one, I don’t know of any who doesn’t send work e-mails on their personal e-mail address. It is done all the time. What Hillary did was OK at the time. She got approval to do it. Yes, she used a private server, which I would argue probably turns out to be safer than some of the government servers which has been hacked.”
But Boxer argued that through the scandal Hillary “is proving… that she can take the heat.”
“If you look at her right now, still leading by a lot, compared to Jeb Bush, who has been knocked to the bottom, you see the reservoir of faith there is in Hillary,” she continued.
“And once this is behind her, I am so excited. But it has got to get behind her. She said she would have done it differently. But I think when people sit down and say, OK, I don’t like the way she did her e-mails, that is a bad thing, but I love the way she fights for our families and for our children and for a foreign policy that makes us safe, I think that we will get past this. I really do.”
Boxer took 52 percent of the vote to Fiorina’s 42 percent in the 2010 California Senate election. Boxer won largely with the number of votes in the Bay Area; she won Los Angeles County while Fiorina took all surrounding counties: Ventura, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino, as well as San Diego. They only debated once during the cycle.
“Everybody has a right to follow their dreams, but nobody has a right to win without proving that they really care about people,” Boxer said last night.
“And the reason I was able to beat her by really a landslide in a year that was terrible for Democrats was because of her record. She had laid off tens of thousands of workers. She pocketed millions of dollars in a golden parachute, was fired from Hewlett-Packard. She had been fired before that.”
Boxer said she had former HP employees cut commercials for her campaign because they were “so mistreated.”
“She actually had them training their replacements, people who were coming from abroad. So it was a pretty awful record that she had,” the senator continued. “Plus, what is incredible is, when she was the CEO of Hewlett- Packard, they actually were selling printers to Iran, and there was an executive order that said no. And the SEC caught them. So, she has got so many problems.”
“I say, if the Republicans choose her, we will walk into the presidency. Really, we will.”
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