Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina made her candidacy for one of California's Senate seats official on Wednesday at an event in Orange County. Fiorina, who was an advisor to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., during his run for the White House last year, was also the first woman to lead a Fortune 500 company. Prior to joining HP, she served as an executive vice president at AT&T and helped coordinate Lucent's spin-off. She was ousted by HP's board in 2005.
Fiorina made her announcement at Earth Friendly Products in Garden Grove, Calif., where she discussed her top priorities including job creation, economic recovery and restoring fiscal accountability in Washington. "Throughout my career I've brought people together and solved problems and that is what I plan to do in government - set aside ego and partisanship and work to develop solutions to our problems," she said in a statement.
"I believe big change is not impossible, but it does require leadership, innovative thinking, teamwork and tackling the most obvious and pressing problems first," Fiorina said. "My campaign is going to be about solutions that work for the people of California and about holding Barbara Boxer accountable for her failed record over her last 18 years in the Senate, her utter failure to lead and her track record of bitter and ineffective partisanship."
She will face off in the GOP primary against California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore. For more information visit CarlyforCalifornia.com.
GOP candidates for the 2010 gubernatorial race in California are making a modern campaign move on Wednesday, TechRepublican.com reports. State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and former Rep. Thomas Campbell will be participating in what is believed to be the first ever candidate debate on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Poizner issued a statement saying: "There is no doubt that we need to grow the Republican party and engaging new and young voters through social media outlets like Twitter is an excellent start."
During the debate at Brandman University, both GOP candidates will respond to questions submitted via Twitter as well as questions from Sacramento Bee reporter Dan Walters and other panelists. Poizner urged California voters to watch the debate live on television or online and share their thoughts throughout the night on Twitter. "We need to make California the innovation capital of the world again," he said. The debate can be viewed online here. Follow on Twitter @StevePoizner and @TeamPoizner.
With less than four weeks to go in Virginia's gubernatorial race, supporters for Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds have turned the Internet into a digital battlefield. On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee's Organizing for America effort e-mailed hundreds of thousands of voters in the Commonwealth to lay out the differences between the Deeds and Republican Bob McDonnell. The DNC also unveiled a same-day advertisement on popular social network Facebook that draws attention to McDonnell's "far right wing social views... including that women should not work outside the home."
The ad will appear on Facebook accounts in Virginia wherever McDonnell's name appears and will link to a site called BobMcDonnellBluePrint.com. The DNC said this is the first in a series of planned ads that will target women, young people and other voters. Last month McDonnell rallied prominent female backers to help mend his image after the publication of his 1989 master's thesis. In it, he wrote that working women and feminists had been "detrimental" to the traditional family and slammed federal child care tax credits because they encouraged women to be employed outside the home.
An innovative Google advertising tactic helped Virginia state legislator Creigh Deeds clinch Tuesday night's Democratic gubernatorial primary victory. Starting Monday afternoon, the Deeds campaign launched a Google network blast (sometimes called a Google "surge") to capitalize on his weekend gains in the polls and get out the vote for Election Day, according to an email from a Google spokeswoman. His display ads, which encouraged Virginians to "vote today" and referenced a Washington Post endorsement, reached over 80 percent of people online in Northern Virginia on top sites like WashingtonPost.com and WSJ.com.
The ads were geo-targeted, which means they were only visible to people in Northern Virginia or Washington, DC proper (to capture people that work in the District but live in Virginia). Deeds also recently pulled ahead of his rivals in terms of volume of searches on Google. Searches for his name first surpassed former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and state legislator Brian Moran on May 29 and, as of June 5, searches for Deeds were up more than 25 percent compared to McAuliffe, Google said. Deeds will face Republican Bob McDonnell in November.
NationalJournal.com's David Herbert writes that Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial spirit has given us personal computers, iPods and Google. What the sun-drenched tech capital hasn't produced is a political heavyweight -- a fact that California gubernatorial hopefuls Meg Whitman (R) and Steve Poizner (R) are hoping to change next year. Before Whitman, former eBay CEO, and Poizner, a former tech executive turned state insurance commissioner, the only tech whizzes to jump into statewide politics were engineer and former Rep. Ed Zschau (R), who lost his bid for Senate in 1986, and former eBay executive Steve Westly (D), who served as state controller for four years but lost his 2006 bid for governor. Whitman and Poizner are treading on unfamiliar ground, to be sure. But are they blazing a trail for more Valley crossovers or are they merely two more footnotes in the Valley's thin political history? One thing is for certain: Silicon Valley has begun to throw its immense wealth around. Read the full story here.
Microsoft funded campaigns continue to be a thorn in the side of Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., who could face his third ex-Microsoft employee in a consecutive election in 2010. Media reports have indicated that former Microsoft vice president Susan DelBene, a Democrat, is expected to give Reichert a run for his money. In 2006 and 2008, ex-Microsoft employee Darcy Burner, who was endorsed by EMILY's List, ran against Reichert but she narrowly lost both races. It has been reported that Burner does not plan to run in 2010. On Friday the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation announced that she will serve as the group's executive director.
During her 2008 race, Burner collected more than twice as much money from Internet activists and officials at Microsoft than Reichert in their race for the 8th District seat, a report from CongressDaily found. According to FEC filings, Burner received $93,894 from Microsoft and its employees while Reichert received a total of $35,750. In 2008, Burner also received $104,076 in donations through ActBlue, an online PAC that raises money for Democrats. While DelBene's resume sounds similar to Burner's, the Politico reports DelBene "served in a top management position" while Burner was a mid-level manager. DelBene also helped create Drugstore.com and served as CEO of software firm Nimble Technology. -- Winter Casey
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