CARLY RISING – AND DEFENDING – AT 11:18 A.M. ET:  Carly Fiorina is rising in the polls.  With that are coming increasing scrutiny and attacks from everywhere.  She has a controversial business history.  How she will hold up in the weeks ahead will be a key test, and will determine whether her rise in the numbers will continue.  From Fox: 

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina on Sunday again backed a government shutdown to defund Planned Parenthood and said she wasn’t “afraid” to be the rising star in the GOP field.

“I’m not afraid,” the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive said in a “Fox News Sunday” interview. “I’ve battled cancer. I’ve buried a child.”

Fiorina vaulted into second place in a CNN/ ORC International poll released Sunday, after a strong debate performance Wednesday night.

She barely qualified for the CNN main debate of top-10 candidates and had until now often polled in the single digits.

Fiorina, whose personal story includes a breast cancer diagnosis in 2009 and losing a stepdaughter to drug addiction, is now at 15 percent, up 3 percentage points from a CNN poll last month.

“It’s obviously a very important moment because now more people know who I am,” she said Sunday. “As people come to know me and they understand who I am and what I've done and, most importantly, what I will do, they tend to support me.”

Fiorina will have to continue to defend her corporate record, including her tenure at Hewlett-Packard, from 1999 to 2005, during which she laid off 30,000 employees and outsourced jobs. She was fired by the company’s board of directors amid sharply declining stock prices.

Fiorina says she navigated the company through the most tumultuous time in U.S. history for the tech industry.

COMMENT:  She is being challenged not only on her HP record, but on her management style, her alleged rigidity, and the fact that, since Hewlett-Packard, she hasn't been offered another CEO position.

The heat will be on.  She's a spectacular debater.  The challenge now will be to face down and defeat her critics. 

A Republican attribute has turned into a challenge.  There are too many candidates up there, and narrowing the field will take longer than it normally does.  That means we will not be able to focus early on choosing the best ticket. 

September 21, 2015