CA-Sen: Carly Fiorina Adresses Conejo Valley Republican Women on U.S. Senate Candidacy

Yes, I am late posting this event that happened last Friday afternoon. I have been slammed with Los Angeles Marathon training and work at the dental clinic.

The luncheon crowd was apparently a sell-out. I did not see a vacant seat and folks were lined up along the walls listening to Carly and other Republican candidates for office, including California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner who is running for Governor.

The Ventura County Star report on the event is here.

Two of the top Republican candidates for statewide office were in Thousand Oaks on Friday, both of them locked in tough primaries and spending millions of their own dollars on their campaigns.

Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a candidate for governor, and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, a candidate for U.S. Senate, were the two biggest names at a candidate forum hosted by the Conejo Valley Republican Women.

Fiorina’s speech in Thousand Oaks on Friday looked ahead to the general election. She said the name “Barbara Boxer” about a dozen times, starting with her biggest applause line, “My name is Carly Fiorina and I am running for the United States Senate against Barbara Boxer.”

She later criticized Boxer for voting against trade agreements, not getting federal water turned back on to farms in the Central Valley, not getting enough of her legislation passed, supporting “cap and trade” proposals to fight global warming, and supporting increases in taxes and spending.

“I think Barbara Boxer is a particularly terrible example of a professional politician,” Fiorina said. “You don’t like her; you know she hasn’t done a good job for you.”

Although unpopular among Republican audiences like the one Friday, Boxer won her last election, in 2004, by a margin of 20 percentage points.

In a head-to-head match-up against Fiorina, however, the polling firm Rasmussen Reports found Boxer had only a 3-point lead.

Fiorina’s address was a standard stump speech, introducing herself to the Republican audience with a brief biography and the focusing on her main campaign theme of the California economy, business and jobs. Of all of the many candidate speeches, Fiorina enthralled the mostly female audience. I don’t think Carly will have any trouble winning the Republican women vote in June. There was a definite connection between her and the audience.

One of her many major applause lines was when she related her recent treatment for breast cancer and that she was a cancer survivor. In fact, for someone who has just recently completed radiation treatment and chemotherapy, Fiorina was very animated and healthy looking. She finished her speech to a standing ovation from the lucheon attendees.

In additional posts, I will have my brief interview with Carly (conducted prior to her speech), some word on the Democrat Pary sponsored activists who picketed/protested the event and some additional photos.

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