MENDACITO FALLS, IOWA — 2016 Republican Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has been up and down in the polls of late. She made a huge splash at the second Republican debate when she boldly challenged Hillary Clinton and other Democrats to watch sting videos put out by right-wing anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress that targeted Planned Parenthood. The strident rebuke of Clinton won her quick favor with Republican voters, but as the veracity of her claims as to what she saw in the video started to deteriorate, he numbers began to flag.
Her recent poll dip is why, according to top Fiorina aides, she decided to try to inflate herself in the eyes of the GOP base by telling them a story that she hoped would evoke both a sense of patriotism, and that would show her to literally be a fighter. “The night I knocked out Ivan Drago in front of a few thousand screaming Communist Russians was easily the biggest highlight of my life,” Fiorina told an assembled crowd at a campaign stop in Iowa just a day after the recent CNBC debate. The former HP CEO was confronted by CNN for an old Mitt Romney talking point about the loss of jobs for women in the first month or so of President Barack Obama’s presidency, but the next day in New Hampshire she was focused on solely on relating the details of her match with a Russian champion-caliber boxer.
“Rest assured, this is all completely verifiable, and there is unedited film out there to back me up,” Fiorina told her audience, “I flew to Russia, trained for months, grew a crazy beard, and fought and defeated Ivan Drago, the communist boxing legend.” Fiorina said that it was after she watched Drago kill her former best friend and trainer in an exhibition bout in Las Vegas that she decided she had to do something, no matter how hard it seemed to take down the behemoth of Drago.
“Sometimes,” Fiorina said, ‘there’s no easy way out. There’s no shortcut home. There’s no easy, no easy, no easy way out,” Fiorina repeated, seemingly for no reason. “So I dug deep. I knew Drago was blood doping, but I went all-natural. While he was working out in his state of the art facility in Moscow, I was in the Russian back country, being constantly monitored.” Fiorina told her supporters that she would do pull-ups in the rustic cabin she was living in, hanging from the banister. She told the audience and reporters that she’d climb giant, snow-covered mountains, leaving her Russian chaperons in the dust, and she’d scream out Drago’s name when she got to the top.
Ms. Fiorina told reporters she wasn’t worried about the big differences in training between herself and Drago because she was “an American and as such [she] was capable of doing things better, just by virtue of being American.” Fiorina, who ran and lost for a Senate seat out of California in 2010, said that as the night of the bout approached, she knew she was going to win. “It was round after round of intense boxing. But I knew I would win, and rest assured, by the end of the match, the crowd that had been chanting ‘Drago! Drago! Drago!’ suddenly was chanting ‘Carly! Carly! Carly!'”
Despite suffering heavy brain damage that night, which she says is evidenced by her insistence that she sees things in videos that aren’t actually there, Fiorina said she would “absolutely fight Drago” again because she wasn’t just fighting Drago. “I was fighting all of Communist Russia, and while things certainly did get rather rocky, I had them under control the whole time because I’m an American and winning is just what we do.”
Representatives for Ivan Drago could not be reached, because he’s a fictional character in a movie.
