Chuck Todd should have been ready for this, but he wasn't.
Just a few days days ago, on the very network at which Todd toils, "Late Night" comedian Seth Meyers thought he would be cute and embarrass GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina over not registering the CarlyFiorina.org domain, thereby allowing a critic to take it and use it as a platform for criticizing her tenure as H-P's CEO. Fiorina then informed Meyers that she had just purchased SethMeyers.org moments earlier. When the ignorant comedian speculated that doing so must have been expensive, she told him that the price tag was cheap. On Sunday's "Meet the Press," Todd went after Fiorina over the same matter, with the same eventual result.
Todd used the CarlyFiorina.org owner's emphasis on the layoffs at H-P during Fiorina's tenure to question whether her time there was successful (bolds are mine):
CHUCK TODD: Well, you bring up your business background, with HP. And let's just say that it's certainly been litigated quite a bit there. Let me pull up, you've seen this website, CarlyFiorina.org, and a person there sits there and he says, "You've failed to register this domain, so I'm using it to tell how many people lost their jobs while you were CEO."
And it's got an emoticon of sad faces there, 30,000 people. Then it has a quote from you, which I know was taken out of context, but had to do with people you fired as executive. And it says here, "I would have done them all faster." Do you have regrets about those layoffs?
CARLY FIORINA: You know what's interesting to me is that website, as well as your line of questioning, just leaves out a whole bunch of other facts. That's the thing about business. Facts and numbers and results actually count. It's not just about words as it is in politics.
(OVERTALK)
CHUCK TODD: Well, then let me ask you, why did they fire you?
CARLY FIORINA: I've been at Hewlett-Packard through the worst technology recession in 25 years. And yes, indeed, some tough calls were necessary. There's nothing worse than laying someone off. On the other hand, many companies against which we competed are gone all together. And what people fail to comment on is the fact that we doubled the size of the company, we took the growth rate from 2% to 9%, we tripled the rate of innovations to 11 patents a day.
We went from lagging behind in every product category to leading in every product category. And yes, in fact, we grew jobs here in the U.S. and all over the world. You can't just leave those facts out. Because they are as vital to the record to the fact that yes, indeed, I had to make some tough calls during some tough times. Tough times that many technology companies didn't survive at all.
CHUCK TODD: Two facts here, why did HP's board fire you? And why, on the day that they did, the stock went up nearly 7%?
CARLY FIORINA: Well, they did fire me. I've been very open about that. I was fired in a boardroom brawl. We had board members who were leaking information out of the boardroom. You know, the truth is this: it is a leader's job to challenge the status quo. And when you do, you make enemies.
I understand that well. But the track record of the people of Hewlett-Packard and I, over an almost six-year period, is crystal clear. The stock has gone down during my tenure, as did every other single technology company. And I think what you'll find, if you follow the stock market at all, is every time there is a change with a company, the stock tends to go up, whether it's splitting the company, which the current CEO just announced.
The stock market is not a good arbiter of success over the long term. (In context, it's clear that Fiorina meant "the short-term." — Ed.) The average holding of stock today is less than 90 days. It is more a reflection of current emotion and conventional wisdom and anything else. And a CEO cannot run a company that's based on conventional wisdom or current emotion. A CEO's job is to build sustainable value over the long term for as many employees, as many customers, and as many communities as possible.
Shorly after the interview, at 10:38 a.m. Easter Time, Fiorina took to Twitter and had some news for Todd (HT Twitchy):
ChuckTodd.org now forwards to Fiorina's presidential campaign web site.
Todd, like Meyers a few days earlier, was at least gracious in his response: "@CarlyFiorina very clever. Campaign works fast."
It's strange that use of the dot-org domain was originally intended to be for not-for-profit enterprises, primarily charities, and somehow got co-opted as something available for more general use.
It's stranger that the press is obsessed over Fiorina's "failure" to register CarlyFiorina.org — a definite oversight, but certainly not a sign of disorganization or disarray — when there has been a proliferation of potential dot-whatever domains. It's overwhelmingly likely that the press would be making the same noise and amplifying the claims of Fiorina's antagonist if that person had instead registered dot-us, dot-net, or any one of several other popular domain extensions.
Far stranger is the fact, as pointed out by a NewsBusters commenter several days ago, that BarackObama.org goes to a "server default page." Additionally, BarackObama.net goes to a stale independent web page supporting President Obama's 2008 presidential candidacy, meaning that the supposedly well-oiled David Axelrod machine failed to register it in their candidate's name. BarackObama.ws goes to a site promoting "Income for life from home." Yet none of these occurrences have been thrown in the President's face as some kind of implication of incompetence — because they really aren't.
Fiorina's isn't either. So enough already.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
