Laughs

Clinton laughs off Fiorina's surge

Hillary Clinton's campaign isn't sweating the rise of the GOP's new star.

By Gabriel Debenedetti

Ask Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategists about Carly Fiorina, and they mostly just laugh.

Fiorina’s in the big leagues now: She was the consensus breakout star of the second Republican debate, major donors are flocking to her, and her national coverage has skyrocketed. But in Clinton’s camp, she’s hardly seen as a threat.

“It’s clear when you talk to Republicans that she’s a flash in the pan,” said one Washington-based Democratic strategist familiar with the thinking inside Clinton’s operation, who also dismissed her as “the flavor of the month.”

“She’s a perfect foil for Trump. But she does not appear to have any lasting power,” he added.

Half a dozen Democratic strategists and donors echoed that view, noting Fiorina’s low polling ceiling and rejecting the idea that the former Hewlett Packard CEO’s gender would pose a problem for Clinton.

"There's no sense that just because she's a woman we should take her more seriously," said another Clinton-aligned Democrat.

Plus, they say, the playbook against her — perfected by Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Clinton ally who beat Fiorina in a 2010 Senate race — is so obvious that even if she did break to the top of polls, she would be easy to dispatch.

“When people find out she ran her company into the ground and jumped out of the plane with a golden parachute, they’ll run,” said California Democratic strategist Ace Smith, who worked on Boxer’s campaign and played Fiorina in the senator’s 2010 debate prep.

Or, in the words of the D.C. Democrat close to the campaign: “The playbook on her is just devastating. It makes the stuff against Mitt Romney look like child’s play."

All it would take to beat her would be television spots featuring the workers who were laid off under Fiorina at HP, multiple Democrats said. And it doesn’t hurt that Jim Margolis, who made Boxer’s 2010 brutal ads against Fiorina, is now Clinton’s lead ad-maker.

One particularly effective Boxer ad noted that, "while Californians lost their jobs, Fiorina tripled her salary, bought a million-dollar yacht and five corporate jets."

So there’s no new Fiorina task force in Brooklyn or at the offices of the pro-Clinton super PACs. Her name isn’t popping up in strategic planning meetings or on calls with donors. Clinton hasn’t started calling her out on the campaign trail. Nobody in Brooklyn has even called Smith — who ran Clinton's California and Texas operations in 2008 — to ask for advice in handling her, he said.

Nor has Fiorina’s post-debate polling pop vaulted her into the category of serious contenders in the Clinton camp’s eyes – a tier that, with Scott Walker out of the race, is now down to Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich.

“Honestly, I haven’t seen anything different except people saying, in general conversation, ‘I’d hate to work for her,’” said top Clinton donor and fundraiser Alan Patricof. “I don’t think anyone’s worried.”

One of the breakout moments for Fiorina at last week’s debate was her impassioned riff against Planned Parenthood — "If we do not stand up and force President Obama to veto [funding], shame on us," she said – and Clinton allies see that answer, particularly coming from the only woman in the GOP field, as major ammunition against her party.

After the debate, Clinton’s camp focused on Republicans’ plan to turn the Planned Parenthood funding squabble into a government shutdown fight, and Fiorina’s comments were front and center.

“Those 25 seconds where she made that emotional plea for a shutdown moved the whole debate over,” explained the strategist close to the Clinton camp. “The likelihood of a shutdown and the pressure on Republican candidates to endorse a shutdown is a very good thing for Democrats in general, for the Clinton campaign, for everybody.”

Still, while the campaign itself has not attacked Fiorina, two of her allies – Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List – have both started going after her more intensely. And Democratic opposition research groups have been shoring up their material on the former executive — some of it inherited from Boxer— officials at those groups told POLITICO.

And that, some acknowledged, is indeed because of Fiorina’s position as the sole Republican woman in the race. But it’s not because they see her as a dangerous candidate in her own right.

While Fiorina is unlikely to be the nominee, many Democrats expect her to eventually reprise her summertime role as Clinton’s main antagonist when she becomes an attack dog for the eventual Republican standard-bearer — so there’s value in getting ready to rough her up.

“She can still play an effective role as a surrogate in the general,” said one Washington Democrat who predicts the party’s machinery will eventually ramp up against her.

“At some point Fiorina was going to feel the heat. This just happens to be her moment in the sun.”

Fiorina's campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.