Carly Fiorina Can’t Be Happy With CarlyFiorina.Org

It should be the first commandment of 21st century politics: if you’re even thinking about running for president, register all the domain names available to you.

Carly Fiorina, who announced her presidential bid today, apparently didn’t heed that maxim. The webpage CarlyFiorina.org has been bought by a Fiorina critic, who has peppered it with 30,000 frown faces, each one representing an employee who was laid off when she served as CEO of Hewlett Packard.

Entering the URL CarlyFiorina.org brings the user to this page:

“Carly Fiorina failed to register this domain.

So I’m using it to tell you how many people she laid off at Hewlett-Packard.

It was this many:

:( :( :(…” (And so on.)

“That’s 30,000 people she laid off. People with families,” the anonymous author concludes.

Fiorina, while a pioneering female executive, has been criticized for her tenure at the helm of Hewlett Packard, when thousands of employees were laid off. She was forced to resign in 2005, and went on to advise Republican John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

So let it serve as a reminder to presidential candidates: register your domain names.