Carly Fiorina is running for U.S. Senate in California on the Republican Party ticket. She served as chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005. In 2008, she was an advisor to presidential candidate John McCain. She is running against Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.
Fiorina recently agreed to answer 8 questions from The Daily Caller’s S.E. Cupp:
S.E. Cupp (SE) : What’s the worst thing you’ve eaten on the campaign trail?
Carly Fiorina (CF): With all the traveling I do, I end up eating fast food in the car quite frequently. At this point, I won’t be sad if I never eat another McDonald’s Southwest Chicken Salad again.
SE: You’re put in charge of national unemployment. What do you do?
CF: Start fighting for every single American job. It’s what our competitors around the world do, and we need to beat them at their own game – and that requires both creating new jobs here at home and bringing jobs back from overseas.
I believe strongly that our nation’s small businesses are the key to getting Americans back to work; as it is, they employ about half of our private-sector workforce and create two-thirds of the new jobs in our country. We need them to resume hiring, and that requires allowing them to keep more of what they earn and provide them with more tax and regulatory certainty.
Besides calling for lower taxes and less onerous regulation on these job creators overall, I’ve also specifically proposed lowering the tax rate on repatriated corporate profits for businesses that re-invest those profits in capital equipment and job creation here in the United States. I’ve also called for the creation of Jobs for Americans Zones, which are selected geographic areas throughout the country where targeted, substantial federal tax benefits, including a 10-year tax holiday for facilities repatriated from overseas, will help lure jobs back to America.
SE: What’s your favorite work of fiction, and why?
CF: “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck because not only does Steinbeck, a Californian I might add, capture the very human impact of the Great Depression on Americans, but he does so through a beautifully written and thoughtful novel that engages you from the first to last sentence.
SE: You can sing any karaoke song and kill it. Which one do you pick?
CF: “Respect” by Aretha Franklin.
NEXT: Who would Fiorina want to play her in a movie?
SE: Politicians are much maligned in America right now. If you want some love, why not go into the NFL or hip hop?
CF: Because I throw like a girl, and my hip-hop skills are worse than Betty White’s.
But in all seriousness, the last thing I want to do is become a politician. I am doing this because I think our nation is headed in the wrong direction and I think that my experience in job creation can help inform the solutions to our challenges.
I think our government was designed to be comprised of citizens from the real world who took time to serve a term or two in Congress and then to return to private life. That’s what I think our Founding Fathers intended in establishing a citizen government. But in recent decades, we’ve seen more and more career politicians who become beholden to the special interest groups that fund their campaigns and who are more interested in winning re-election than they are in serving their constituents.
SE: Who would you want to play you in a movie?
CF: Annette Bening.
SE: Your house is going up in flames and you can save one (non-living) thing. What is it?
CF: A painting my mother completed that hangs in our living room.
SE: If you can make one promise to voters, what would it be?
CF: I will never forget whom I work for. I will always want to hear from my employers, the people of California, and I will always want them to be honest with me, whether it’s the good, the bad or the ugly.