Presidential Candidates Can’t Figure Out ‘How To Internet’
The presidential election buzz is about to explode as the November 2016 election date approaches us. Among the many candidates announced, two are sticking out for some not so ideal reasons.
Carly Fiorina is having some seemingly elementary issues with purchasing her campaign’s website domains and Ted Cruz has seen a lot of recent backlash due to a wave of questionable tweets from both of his Twitter handles.
Simply put Carly Fiorina can’t internet, and Ted Cruz can’t Twitter.
Fiorina has more of a background in business than the world of politics. Having been a former exec at AT&T and CEO of Hewlett Packard, Fiorina had made a name for herself as one of the most prosperous women in business. That was all until a huge series of HP layoffs that occurred in the early 2000’s and likely resulted in some bad juju with quite a few thousand people since then. Fiorina worked on the 2006 John McCain campaign but doesn’t have any real political experience under her belt. That being said, she did partake in the 2010 California Senate Elections, but failed to land a spot.
As any campaign organizer will tell you, internet presence is a must for anyone who wants to earn that coveted seat in the White House. So step one to an effective campaign would be purchasing and maintaining a website, or better yet, a website with all of the related domains redirecting back to that campaign page. That way when someone is trying to find information on a certain campaign they aren’t facing any red tape that gets in the way.
However, Carly Fiorina thought this was not all that important, and failed to purchase her targeted domain at CarlyFiorina.org. Take a quick look at that last link and you’ll quickly notice why her carelessness has backfired.
When Fiorina failed to claim the domains related to her name, someone jumped on the opportunity to do something harsh and eye-opening. The .org domain has been constructed into a website that points out how many jobs were lost at HP due to Carly Fiorina. The top of the page reads:
“Carly Fiorina failed to register this domain.
So I’m using it to tell you how many people she laid off. It was this many:”
A visual interpretation of what I’m assuming is (although I didn’t count them all) 30,000 frowny emoticons follows, represents all of the lost jobs.
At the bottom of the page another passage reads:
“That’s 30,000 people she laid off. People with families. And what does she say she would have done differently?
“I would have done them all faster”
-Carly Fiorina”
According to the website who.is, the website domain was purchased back in December, well after she announced her intent to run.
Up next on the campaign chopping block, is Ted Cruz. This guy has managed to be the top trending presidential hopeful on Twitter, which is great in theory. Ted Cruz has been able to generate much more buzz than ever Hillary Clinton. The only problem is that Cruz is trending for all of the wrong reasons.
Ted Cruz is one of those blessed with endless potential to radiate either negative or positive PR. Taking a look at some of his tweets is like finding a “diamond in the rough” that was actually a not a diamond at all, rather a pebble spray-painted with a metallic finish.
On Nov. 10 of last year Cruz tweeted:
“Net Neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that there are some huge inconsistencies within these words. Cruz has already proven he doesn’t know what internet freedom means, and this further solidifies that belief.
Tweet example number one is an early tweet that paved the way for others that followed suit. Example number two is a tweet from March 15:
“Federal govt has no business sticking its nose in education. We need to repeal every word of the Common Core! #nhpolitics #MakeDCListen”
This is another asinine angle to take, because at the most basic level Common Core was voluntarily adopted by the states. The states worked together to initiate Common Core, so wouldn’t this be a pure example of “state’s rights”? Common Core would actually be a beneficial policy for Cruz to advocate, given the fact that most Republicans want states to decide what they want on their own accord.
As an added bonus, check out the popular hashtag that has proven to be comedic gold: #TedCruzCampaignSlogans
Tweets haven’t seen this much criticism since the 2013, Justine Sacco tweets. That brought up the question of “how did someone who spews garbage tweets become the Director of Corporate Communications at a giant internet entity like IAC?” But on that note, how will these events pan out for these two presidential hopefuls?
The above mentioned examples are simple and avoidable instances that have been overlooked by both candidates and have become pitfalls for their blooming public relations tactics. Both of these candidates seem to have trouble wrapping their heads around how the internet works. I wonder if they understand how Google works, or if they grasp the drastic amount of influence that the internet has in a presidential campaign?
One thing is for sure, Fiorina and Cruz have raised some social networking and public relations red flags. For these two tech-illiterate candidates a question directed toward their competition still remains: “how do they internet so well?”