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Divided We Stand

Divided We Stand
New book about the 2020 election.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

CA: Carly, Sarah, and Demon Sheep

Sarah Palin has used Facebook to endorse Carly Fiorina:
Carly is the Commonsense Conservative that California needs and our country could sure use in these trying times. Most importantly, she’s running for the right reasons. She has an understanding that is sorely lacking in D.C. She’s not a career politician. She’s a businesswoman who has run a major corporation. She knows how to really incentivize job creation. Her fiscal conservatism is rooted in real life experience. She knows that when government grows, the private sector shrinks under the burden of debt and deficits. We can trust Carly to do the right thing for America’s economy and to make the principled decisions she has throughout her professional career.

Palin also states that Fiorini "grew up in a modest home with a school teacher dad." But the several biographies I've seen of the candidate state that she is the daughter of "Joseph Sneed (a law professor and judge) and Madeline (a painter; maiden name unknown)."

Joseph Sneed was an iconic law professor at Stanford. I missed him by a year, but often stared at his portrait in the main lecture hall (he seemed to stare back). His former students would be amused to hear him referred to as a school teacher and, from what I've heard, to see the word "modest" in a the same sentence as his name.

Indeed, her dad's status as a judge could be a vulnerability, as Politico reported a while back:

California Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina was negotiating for a lucrative job as CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co. a decade ago at the same time her father wrote a significant appeals court opinion that the high-tech industry had aggressively lobbied for, a new book reports.
In July 1999, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Joseph Sneed, Fiorina’s father, issued a ruling that made it far more difficult for class-action lawyers to file securities lawsuits. Breaking with two other courts of appeals, Sneed said a legal reform Congress passed in 1995 at the urging of high-tech executives besieged by such suits meant plaintiffs needed solid evidence of wrongdoing before they went to court.
Seventeen days later, Fiorina was named as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard with a compensation packaged valued at the time at between $80 million and $90 million.

Meanwhile, the California Democratic Party and DSCC preview their fall line of attack: