Bait

Carly isn't taking Trump's bait

As a confrontation of the GOP's top two looms, Fiorina is playing on her terms.

By Eli Stokols

For the first time in this 2016 presidential contest, Donald Trump is facing a rival who doesn't take his bait.

Carly Fiorina — whose best-known accomplishments are a mixed business record and a losing bid for Senate — is chipping away at Trump's lead. And she's doing it by largely ignoring his taunts and publicly shaming his behavior.

Basking in the applause of standing-room-only crowds hearing her well-worn riffs for the first time Tuesday, Fiorina mentioned Trump just a few times during two events along the South Carolina coast, choosing instead to draw implied contrasts between herself and the current GOP frontrunner by underscoring the need for preparation and knowledge on a range of complex issues.

The shaming part is old hat — every Republican who has tried to knock Trump down a notch and raise their standing in the eyes of voters has criticized his bombast and boasting. But none of them has so skillfully inserted the blade as Fiorina, nor been able to control the urge to fight Trump on Trump's terms.

“It might seem that Donald Trump’s getting a little nervous,” Fiorina bragged in response to the first question during a press gaggle, which was, predictably, about Trump. “Maybe I’m getting under his skin.”

Maybe so. Fiorina’s performance in last week’s debate shot her into second place with 15 percent in the latest CNN/ORC poll of Republican primary voters. Trump, who’s dominated the race for two months, slipped eight points, down to 24 percent.

And Trump, who canceled a South Carolina appearance last week after he caused a furor with another controversial comment, has clearly noticed. He will cross paths with Fiorina here on Wednesday, when the GOP’s two polling leaders stump in the early-voting state.

In a way, they're part of the same phenomenon — both are political outsiders and businesspeople who claim they'll be better at getting things done than the same old hacks in Washington.

“The Republican electorate this cycle is attracted to candidates conveying strength. Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina are conveying strength better than their rivals, even though they’re doing it in very different ways,” said Steve Schmidt, a GOP operative who guided John McCain’s 2008 campaign. “Now, with them polling one and two, it’s inevitable that this confrontation is about to come to a head.”

If Fiorina is successful this week on her three-day swing through hotly contested South Carolina, and is able to sustain the momentum she earned in last week's debate, then her messaging and tactics will amount to a political clinic for every other Republican hoping to secure a bigger slice of the electorate's support.

If not, she could join the likes of Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich — outsider candidates who momentarily caught the eye of Republican voters, only to be discarded once the primary got seriously underway.

As for Trump, after monopolizing the country’s cable TV airwaves for weeks, he is building out a serious organization, including in the South.

On Tuesday, he announced new hires of state directors in Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia, three key southern states holding primaries on March 1, a sign that he could be looking to consolidate his existing support into an SEC primary firewall. In South Carolina, Ed McMullan, a respected Republican operative in the state, is guiding Trump’s campaign.

“This isn’t the B team,” said Bruce Haynes, a GOP strategist and South Carolina native. “He’s got a universal brand, pretty decent positives and, lo and behold, a real campaign.”

On Wednesday, Trump will speak at a conference hosted by the South Carolina African-American Chamber of Commerce in Charleston at 2 p.m. before heading to Columbia for a 6 p.m. town hall on issues of race, hosted by U.S. Sen. Tim Scott.

Fiorina's approach in the state has been to double down on substance. She spent Tuesday emphasizing her depth of knowledge at a national security forum, where she offered detailed answers and name-dropped a number of foreign leaders — offering a less than subtle contrast between herself and Trump, who has shrugged off criticism for his inability to distinguish between the Kurds and Quds Force or Hamas and Hezbollah.

“I’m sorry for the long answers, but these are complex issues that are important for people to understand,” she said at one point, seated beside a moderator who’d been silent for several minutes as she went on.

Professing that she doesn’t spend all of her time worrying about Trump, Fiorina referred to him by name just once during the forum, hosted at The Citadel in Charleston. Responding to a question about immigration reform, Fiorina noted: “With all due respect to Mr. Trump, he did not bring this issue up. We’ve been talking about immigration reform for 25 years.”

A few hours later, before a crowd of 1,400 conservatives in Myrtle Beach, Fiorina referred to Trump again, albeit glancingly, in responding to a question about her litmus test for choosing Supreme Court justices. Emphasizing her belief in protecting individual ilberties, Fiorina pointed to the 20-year-old story of an elderly Atlantic City woman who fought to save her home from Trump's use of eminent domain.

"Donald Trump's casinos and the city of Atlantic City decided that they wanted a parking lot for limousines and they took over Vera Coking's home," Fiorina recounted. "One of the things going on in this country today is we have an unholy alliance between business interests and political interests and lobbyists that serve both and they all get together and the individual becomes very small as government becomes very big and powerful."

Fiorina, of course, has vulnerabilities of her own.

While she is reveling in the larger crowds and relaying stories of the last-minute venue changes to accommodate them, her South Carolina operation itself still lacks the bandwidth to capitalize on her current standing in the polls. "The bigger problem is the other campaigns have drained the talent pool, and there are no veteran operatives willing to take such a risky job," one GOP operative in South Carolina said.

At the moment, Fiorina's top paid operative in the state is Taylor Mason, 23, who is just a couple years out of college and serving as her super PAC's political director.

Earlier Tuesday, Fiorina's deputy campaign manager Sarah Isgur Flores posted a long rumination — “Some thoughts as we drive through South Carolina today,” it was titled — on Medium, responding to practically everyone who’s been critical of Fiorina in recent days, from Trump to the Yale business professor who has trashed her record at HP, where she laid off 30,000 employees and saw the company lose more than half of its total value.

“Layoffs are tough,” Isgur Flores wrote. “They require tough decisions about what is necessary for the health and future of a company. A lot of Americans wish someone were making those tough decisions in Washington instead of simply piling on the spending year after year.”

On Tuesday night in Virginia, Fiorina’s super PAC, which is organizing many of her campaign events, released a new film, “Citizen Carly,” offering a more flattering portrayal of her work leading HP, a preemptive response to the kinds of devastating attacks that sank Fiorina’s 2010 Senate bid in California — attacks everyone knows are coming.

“We know she’s a good debater, that she’s good with the talking points. Now, we’re going to find out if she can really campaign,” said Haynes. “The takedown on HP is pretty violent, as anyone knows who remembers [California Sen. Barbara] Boxer’s attack ads from 2010. We’re about to find out if she can survive once we get to the television phase of this when those kinds of ads are airing in Iowa and South Carolina.”

Trump hasn’t wasted any time lambasting Fiorina over her tenure at HP, seizing on a question about her business record at a New Hampshire town hall and tweeting over the weekend: “Carly Fiorina did such a horrible job at Lucent and HP, virtually destroying both companies, that she never got another CEO job offer!”

In an interview on Fox News Monday, Trump portrayed Fiorina as a robotic candidate. "I have heard her speak numerous times and she uses many of the same lines and many of them I can quote exactly word from word and it comes out like a robot," he said. "And, frankly, if you hear her for periods of time, you get a big, fat, beautiful headache. And I have seen this and I have watched it."

Fiorina, whose measured, succinct response on the debate stage to Trump’s remarks about her appearance was devastatingly effective, appears to have no interest in being goaded into the kind of tit-for-tat war of words that threw Jeb Bush’s campaign off course last month.

“I kind of look at it like, ‘Haters gonna hate’ — and we’re gonna shake it off,” said Phyllis Henderson, a state representative from Greenville who is helping Fiorina’s campaign and its super PAC in an unofficial role. “When you’re in politics and you get in the front, people are going to say things about you. She led a $90 billion company; she’s used to people not liking her. She’s not going to let it bother her. She’s got this very clear sense of where she wants to go."

It may well be that the most thin-skinned presidential candidate in the field is struggling to engage the rival with the hardest shell. But Fiorina’s selective engagement with Trump isn’t just a measure of contrasting personalities — it’s strategic.

“Despite being a first-time candidate, Carly Fiorina has played a round on this course,” said Schmidt, who recalled Fiorina spending months within the inner circle of the 2008 McCain campaign, riding along in the back of the plane, sitting in on high-level meetings and serving for several months as a high-profile surrogate.

“She’s smart enough to know that if they’re both brawling for a long time, it could amount to a murder-suicide pact that hurts them both,” Schmidt continued. “The last thing Carly Fiorina wants to do is be the one who finally slays the dragon of Donald Trump and then open the door for Jeb Bush or another candidate to benefit.”