GREENWOOD VILLAGE | Following a bit of campaign-season back-slapping, it was all business at a working women’s event Saturday in Greenwood Village, held by incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman and largely targeting female voters — particularly working professionals and small business owners.
In his introduction of the event’s featured speaker — former Hewlett Packard CEO and Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina — Coffman appealed less to traditional so-called women’s issues than to the experiences of small business owners and other professionals at large.
“A lot of people think of me as having a military background, but I also have a small business background,” Coffman said, recounting his struggles to break into entrepreneurship coming out of the Marine Corps with no business experience to speak of. “I got so frustrated … I ended up taking my savings from having served overseas and put it down on a small business idea, where I learned how to balance a budget, meet a payroll and run an organization efficiently enough to make a profit — a quality not readily found in Washington, D.C.”
Coffman is running for re-election to his 6th Congressional District seat against Democrat state Sen. Morgan Carroll. Coffman has systematically reached out to minority voters in the swing district over the past few years, but pundits say women voters could be critical during this election down ticket from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Polls show Trump trailing in the quest to secure college educated women, and some Republicans worry that these women voters might sit this election out, or vote Democrat in down-ticket races. Both Coffman and Carroll are working to shore up key constituencies.
Fiorina lauded the four-term congressman’s message of commitment, determination and service, describing him as a vessel of change and a true representative of constituents.
“Real change happens in our communities and our districts, so I think it’s really important we support servant leaders,” she said. “Not everybody is a servant leader. Some people are in it for themselves … Mike is a servant leader. He’s demonstrated to us over and over.”
And with the presidential election dominating the November ticket, Fiorina reminded the 130 or so invited guests in attendance — largely women — to not lose focus of the lower-level campaigns which she said have more impact on “real issues.”
“It’s time to take our country back,” she said, speaking to an “everybody’s voice counts” sort of democratic ideology. She added that the most important role of women — in addition to their parts as working professionals, business owners, daughters, wives and grandmothers — was as citizens.
“There’s a lot that ails our country and our state and our communities now, and we as citizens have far more power than anyone,” she said. “Women in particular represent huge untapped potential in this state and in this country.
“But, I know we still have a long way to go as women,” she added.
For starters, Fiorina said she’s fed up with Democrats’ discussions of “women’s issues,” platitudes she described as divisive to citizens as a whole and belittling, rather than empowering, to women.
“I resent when Democrats or progressives talk about women’s issues,” she said. “What’s a woman’s issue? Every issue is a woman’s issue.”
Fiorina also blasted Democrats for painting women into a corner by dictating what a woman should believe or how she should vote.
“I resent it deeply when people tell you as a feminist you have to agree with a certain position on issues,” she said. “That’s not feminism.
“Here’s my definition of feminism: A feminist is a woman who has the opportunity and chooses to use all of her God-given gifts … any woman who chooses to live life on her own terms and has the opportunity to do so,” Fiorina added. “And nobody defines those terms for her. She defines them for herself.”
The easiest way to define those terms? Through engagement, Fiorina said, urging the audience to be a part of change.
“Women can change the world and, in fact, we do every single day,” Fiorina said. “And every piece of data says that when you get women actively engaged in any problem … things get better. So, thank you for being here and for being engaged.”
For the remainder of her time, Fiorina — the first woman to ever take corporate leadership over a Fortune 20 company — discussed in a Q&A with local small business stakeholders what she knows best: business. She extolled the empowerment and other virtues of small business ownership and entrepreneurship, and blamed complex government business regulations, over-taxation and Obamacare for slowing the wheels of economic development and job growth.
“Unfortunately, Democrats are frequently the defenders of the status quo of big, complicated government,” she said. “We need to create more opportunities for entrepreneurship. We need to make it easier to start a small business. We need to make it easier to succeed as an entrepreneur and small business owner, because it works, we know it works.
Coffman agreed. “Small businesses are the backbone of job creation and growth in America,” he said.