You have to be careful not to cherry-pick candidate statements, but Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina has now made at least two that raise serious doubts about whether she understands the office she seeks.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” over the weekend, the former Hewlett Packard CEO said she doesn’t have a detailed tax proposal because politicians’ plans “never” come to pass. That came a few weeks after she said the two-week federal government shutdown in 2013 didn’t hurt anyone except some veterans trying to see a monument that was closed.
Statements like those can’t be blamed on Fiorina’s lack of experience in politics or elective office. Anyone who follows the news even superficially would know they’re wrong.
Let’s start with presidents and their plans. “How often do politicians put out detailed plans? How often do they get enacted? Never. That’s the problem. Politicians put out detailed plans for all kinds of things that never happen,” Fiorina said Sunday on NBC. She was so enamored of her point that it is featured in a new YouTube video.
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Yet it’s obvious just from the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama that Fiorina is off-base. Large-scale plans for tax cuts, education reforms and a new Medicare prescription benefit were cornerstones of Bush’s 2000 campaign — and he signed all of them into law. Obama likewise signed major Wall Street and health insurance reforms closely modeled on what he had proposed as a candidate.
And those are just the headline items. PolitiFact has begun tracking in more granular fashion what happens to campaign plans and pledges. So far Obama has kept 70 percent of his campaign promises in whole or in part, and another 7 percent are in the works. He has broken 22 percent of his promises as a result of congressional resistance or his own decisions.
In cases where Bush and Obama failed to deliver, often it was not for lack of trying. Two striking examples are Bush’s push to partially privatize Social Security accounts and Obama’s proposal for a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions. Both ideas died on Capitol Hill. Seven years into his tenure, Obama is still offering alternative plans to close Guantanamo Bay prison, one of his foundational promises in 2008.
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The larger point is that in many respects, particularly domestic policy, the Bush and Obama campaigns previewed exactly what they did once in office. That’s helpful for the winner, since he or she can credibly claim a mandate, and besides, it’s only fair. Voters should have at least some idea what to expect when they make their choices.
Fiorina’s eyebrow-raising September remark about the role of the federal government came as some anti-abortion conservatives were determined to deny federal funds to Planned Parenthood, even if that created an impasse and led to a shutdown. When the government closed in 2013 over funding for the Affordable Care Act, “what happened?” Fiorina asked reporters in South Carolina, then answered her own question: “Government employees got their full pay — in essence they got a two-week paid vacation. I’m not aware of any hardship to anyone, other than the veterans trying to get to the World War II memorial.”
She must not have been paying attention. At all.
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It’s hard to know where to start. Maybe with the shutdown of clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health, resulting in treatment delays that in some cases could make the difference between life and death. There were delays in processing mortgage applications, drilling permits, small business loans, export certificates. Federal worker pay was suspended and payments to contractors were delayed. During the hiatus, some of those people couldn’t pay mortgages and other bills.
Vacations to national parks were ruined, meanwhile, and the businesses that serve the parks were devastated. The Grand Canyon was turning away 18,000 visitors a day, according to Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake, both Republicans. Restaurants, resorts and rafting companies were closing, and food banks were trying to help some 2,200 people suddenly out of work.
Overall, economists estimated, the shutdown accounted for 120,000 lost private sector jobs in the first two weeks of October 2013 and a gross domestic product drop of $12 billion to $24 billion in the fourth quarter. The impact of a 2015 shutdown might have been worse. Millions of low-income people continued to receive food stamps in 2013 due to money remaining from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. That would not have been the case this year.
Fortunately, one of former House Speaker John Boehner’s last acts was to negotiate a two-year budget deal with Obama, Democrats and the GOP Senate. But December will bring more opportunities for shutdowns and for Fiorina to showcase once again her curiously cavalier views on the role of the federal government in the life of the nation and what aspiring presidents owe to the voters who live in it.
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Carly Fiorina Doesn’t Seem to Understand How the Presidency Works originally appeared on usnews.com
