Fiorina aims to keep Clinton from playing ‘gender card’ in race

Associated Press

NASHUA, N.H.

Carly Fiorina, the lone Republican woman eying the White House, wants to block Hillary Rodham Clinton from playing the “gender card” in the 2016 presidential race.

But to do so, Fiorina is taking a page from the gender-politics playbook herself.

A former business executive with limited political experience, Fiorina argues that if Republicans nominate her, it would neutralize any advantages the Democrats might get from having a woman at the top of their ticket.

Speaking of Clinton in an interview with The Associated Press, Fiorina said, “She wants to make it a gender-based campaign; she wants to talk about the war on women; she wants to talk about being the first woman president. She can’t do any of that with me.”

Clinton, who launched her campaign last weekend, has been playing up her life experience as a mother and grandmother, along with her policy work on women’s and children’s issues. She’s not yet directly highlighted the prospect she would be the first female president, something she played down in her failed 2008 campaign.

Though Fiorina has yet to declare her own candidacy, she has been positioning herself for weeks as a foil to Clinton, the clear Democratic front-runner. She’s been among the sharpest Clinton critics in the emerging Republican field, going after the Democrat’s trustworthiness in light of revelations about her private email use as secretary of state, as well as her record as the nation’s chief diplomat.

“Like Mrs. Clinton, I, too, have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles,” Fiorina said this week, reprising a favorite line. “But flying and traveling is an activity, it’s not an accomplishment, and unfortunately, she didn’t accomplish anything as secretary of state.”

The 60-year-old Fiorina says she plans to announce whether she’s running for president in late April or early May. She’s put the likelihood of her running at “higher than 90 percent.”