Each and every candidate has negatives. 

The difference is how severe they are to the relevance of the campaign, and how you decide to address them during the infancy of a campaign.

There is also a third option; ignoring the obvious with constant denials or statements of ignorance. This only emboldens the skeptics and matures the line of questioning the next time around.

Unfortunately, thus far Republican candidate for US Senator, Carly Fiorina, has done the latter. And the questions are arriving closer together.

Monday’s Calbuzz Blog featured my piece on Carly Fiorina and HP’s Iran Printers scandal. Calbuzz decided to follow my phone call to the campaign with one of their own, asking about Fiorina’s statement that she didn’t know about the sales of printers to a country on the US Trade Embargo list.

Calbuzz reports:

The latest Tehran Carly-type shot across the bow came when right-wing  blogger and SacTown talk show host Eric Hogue offered a critical look at the controversy from a conservative perspective that framed the question nicely:

“Although the distributors are separate from HP in operations, there is still the availability for leverage; if HP knew that these distributors were selling to Iran they could have added pressure to encourage them to cease. The issue is whether HP cared enough to find out…

“The question is not whether HP sold printers to Iran through regional distributors, it seems to be whether the HP CEO had the knowledge that it was taking place. Which leads those critical of Carly Fiorina to ask, “How can the CEO not know if her company is violating a US Trade Embargo?”

In his piece, Hogue quoted Fiorina spokeswoman Beth Miller on the candidate’s alleged ignorance about the HP’s distributor dealings by saying: “When I mentioned this to Carly she was shocked, upset and totally caught off-guard.”

When Calbuzz first read that quote, it seemed to suggest strongly that Fiorina was saying she had no knowledge of the Redington-Iran connection until it recently surfaced in the media, years after she left HP.

But when we asked Miller about it, she said that wasn’t what she meant. She said Fiorina was “shocked, upset and totally caught off-guard” by the premise of Hogue’s question — that HP broke the law and violated U.S. trade sanctions — rather than by the reports about HP, Redington and Iran.

Which begged the question:  Does Fiorina’s hear-no-evil, see-no-evil stance on the issue mean that she specifically denies any knowledge of Redington Iranian sales of HP products when she was CEO?

“HP never broke the law and never violated any sanctions,” under Fiorina’s leadership, Miller told us. “There’s never been such an allegation anywhere but the blogosphere,” adding that any such allegation is “wrong and unfounded.”

But what about Redington and its business relationship with HP?

“We’re not going to go into this” further, Miller said.

All righty then.

Funny, but after I checked my notes from my conversation with Firoina’s staff representative, the explanation that Carly Fiorina was “shocked” that I asked her that question is impossible – for I have never spoken with Ms Fiornia, nor did I wait on the phone, or call back, while she was being asked.

As I am re-reading my notes, the only mistake that I could have made was transcribing incorrectly due to my poor handwriting; using the word ”shocked” instead of the possible word of “surprised” to describe Carly’s discovery that HP had sold printers to Iran under her tutelage as CEO.

Believe me, she was not shocked that I asked her that question, she doesn’t know who I am.

These types of defense mechanisms are political career killers.

Here she is, a historic CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and she is unknowing about printers sold to Iran, and shocked that I (someone she has never met or spoken to) asked her a question about such events.

Fiorina has also defended her lack of voting in nearly 75-percent of the state’s past elections – as well as previous state’s of residence – by stating that the records must be mistaken, ‘I obviously voted…something must of gone wrong here with the records.’

Some advice to the Fiorina Team; change buckets now. The ones you are using are full of gas when you should be using buckets of simple water. Just come clean; Carly didn’t always care to vote, and she had a rogue distributor, or two, that sold printers to Iran during a US Trade Embargo.

It was wrong, and she regrets not being able to control the distributors operations in the Middle East.

See how easy that is.

Like water to a fire, the flames begin to die down versus the roaring inferno Fiorina’s Team is starting to build surrounding her race to become the GOP Candidate that challenges Barbara Boxer for the US Senate.