Fiorina on Debate Performance: ‘Now More People Know Who I Am’
WALLACE: “Ms. Fiorina, welcome back to Fox News Sunday.”
FIORINA: “Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me.”
WALLACE: “You’ve noted that up until now, more than half of Republican voters didn’t know who you were. That obviously changed with the debate. So I guess the question is, how pivotal a moment is this right now for your campaign?”
FIORINA: “Well, it’s obviously a very important moment, because now more people know who I am and we know, based on what’s happened before this debate, that as people come to know me and they understand who I am and what I’ve done and most importantly, what I will do, they tend to support me. And so the truth is, we’re going to stay out here working hard every single day so that people who maybe were introduced to me for the first time at that debate now get to know a little bit more about me. These are important decisions. These are serious issues, and I want the American people to know as much about me as possible, actually.”
WALLACE: “Well, of course, with greater attention does come greater scrutiny. Here’s what you said about the political class in the debate.”
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FIORINA: “If someone’s been in a system their whole life, they don’t know how broken the system is. A fish swims in water. It doesn’t know it’s water. It’s not that politicians are bad people. It’s that they’ve been in that system forever.”
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WALLACE: “To make your point, you say how long have we been talking about entitlement reform but doing nothing about it. But, Ms. Fiorina, isn’t that really less about being part of the system and more about the fact that there are really, you know, sizeable real differences between Republicans and Democrats? How would you, as president, get those two sides, which both have their point of view, to compromise?”
FIORINA: “There are some real sizeable differences, for sure. And the way I believe to bridge differences, the way to negotiate a good deal -- and a lot of politics is negotiation. I’ve done a lot of negotiating in my life. You start out by stating very clearly what your principles are, what you must have, what your walk away position is. There can’t be any misunderstanding about that. It can’t be everything, but it has to be something. And then you enter into an open-minded spirit of collaboration about everything else and try to find common ground. That’s how I would work with members of Congress. On the other hand, Chris, there are some issues about which there really is broad bipartisan agreement and yet nothing gets done. How long have we been talking about broad bipartisan reform for tax reform? It doesn’t happen. Everybody says they want to secure the border. It doesn’t happen. Everybody says our VA is a scandal. Nothing changes. So, there are a lot of things about which there is actually agreement and nothing is happening.”
