A video on Fiorina’s website, carlyforpresident.com, shows her watching – and shutting off – a video in which Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton announces her own bid for president.
“Our founders never intended us to have a professional political class,” Fiorina says in her video. “They believed that citizens and leaders needed to step forward. We know the only way to reimagine our government is to reimagine who is leading it. I’m Carly Fiorina, and I’m running for president.”
Political experts consider Fiorina, a Washington outsider, a long shot for the presidency. She has never held elective office, and she lost her 2010 bid for Democrat Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat – Boxer won with 52 percent of the vote to Fiorina’s 42 percent.
Thus far, however, Fiorina’s campaign seems poised to promote her as a foil to career politicians by emphasizing a self-made career of leadership roles within the private sector. Fiorina worked as a secretary at HP before advancing to top positions at AT&T Inc. and Lucent Technologies Inc. She became HP’s chief executive in 1999, making her the first woman to lead a Fortune 20 company. HP’s revenue doubled under Fiorina’s leadership, but her tenure was marred by mass company layoffs and her forced resignation in 2005 after she engineered an unpopular merger with competitor Compaq.
Fiorina earned an undergraduate degree from Stanford University, an MBA from the University of Maryland and a Masters of Science in Business from MIT. She lived in Los Altos Hills until 2011, when she moved to the east coast. Fiorina has two daughters and two granddaughters. She is a breast cancer survivor.
