On the surface it would make sense for Minority Leader David Hann to agree to be a Minnesota co-chair for Carly Fiorina’s Presidential Campaign. Her recent surge in the polls on the back of two strong debate performances (one being a domination of the kids’ table, and the other a standout performance at a larger kids’ table) has led some to think that she has a strong chance to capture the top spot on the GOP Presidential ticket in 2016.
Looking deeper, however, we will see that while her scripted response to a question everyone knew was coming came off impressively (look to Scott Walker’s busted jab about “The Apprentice” for how those can fail) every other one of her big moments in the debate was either based on falsehoods OR raised red flags to those paying attention. Her biggest moment? In which she challenged President Obama and Hillary Clinton to watch a specific segment of the deceptively edited Planned Parenthood videos to witness a scene that doesn’t actually exist.
After outright lying about video footage that she hadn’t seen as it clearly didn’t exist, she still needed to burnish her business credentials. Fiorina later in the debate went on to tout the support of the man who led to her ouster at Hewlett-Packard saying;
“The man that led my firing, Tom Perkins, just took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to say he was wrong, I was right. I was a terrific CEO, the board was dysfunctional. And he thinks I will make a magnificent president of the United States.”
That’s not all Tom Perkins has said in the past eighteen months. In a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal he opined; “I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’”
The following month he went on stage with Fortune to lay out his views on the future of democracy;
“The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes,” Perkins said. “But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”
So, under the Perkins system, Fiorina wouldn’t need to worry about the votes of the 30,000 people she laid off while at Hewlett-Packard – one Tom Perkins would cover it. What Minnesotans should be asking themselves is, why did David Hann agree to campaign for these falsehoods and extreme positions?
