The Washington Post reports that Carly Fiorina is a deadbeat. For example, her pollster in her failed 2010 Senate campaign, Joe Shumate, died about a month before the election. Fiorina praised Shumate as the “heart and soul” of her campaign. She offered “sincere condolences” to his widow.

But records show there was something that Fiorina did not offer his widow: Shumate’s last paycheck, for at least $30,000. It was one of more than 30 invoices, totaling about $500,000, that the multimil­lionaire didn’t settle — even as Fiorina reimbursed herself nearly $1.3 million she lent the campaign. She finally cleared most of the balance in January, a few months before announcing her run for president.

“Occasionally, I’d call and tell her she should pay them,” said Martin Wilson, Fiorina’s former campaign manager, who found Shumate after the pollster collapsed from a heart attack. “She just wouldn’t.”

Note that Fiorina and her husband have a net worth of $59 million. The $500,000 is pocket change to them.

The article continues by documenting mismanagement of money by the Fiorina Senate campaign, and then gets back to the vendors she still owes.

Those who waited the longest to be paid were small businesses with a few dozen employees who did the grunt work of the campaign: building stages, sending out mailers, selling polling data. And at least one is still waiting.

Jon Seaton, the managing partner of East Meridian Strategies, confirmed that his group billed Fiorina’s campaign for $18,000 on Oct. 6, 2010, for printing 21,290 mailers.

A Fiorina staff member wired money for the postage immediately and promised the remaining $9,000 “early next week,” according to e-mails obtained by The Washington Post.

Six weeks went by and nothing came. So Seaton asked again. Then again. As of last week, he said he was still waiting.

Several other vendors weren’t paid until early this year.

This is my favorite part of the article:

Fiorina, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment. Her supporters say the criticism was misplaced.

“People are just upset and angry and throwing her under the bus,” said Jon Cross, Fiorina’s operations director for her Senate campaign. “If we didn’t win, why do you deserve to get paid? If you don’t succeed in business, you shouldn’t be the first one to step up and complain about getting paid.”

She’s not talking about campaign managers here. She’s talking about the vendor who printed and bulk mailed her fliers. Nobody is saying the fliers weren’t printed correctly or that they weren’t mailed on time.

Her supporters cautioned that little could be gleaned from her California campaign. They maintain that Fiorina’s corporate experience is more akin to managing a presidential campaign than a bid for office in one of the nation’s most liberal states.

The liberal California sun warped their brains and made them see demon sheep?

“We know many people didn’t win their first election, so I think you should never overstate that fact,” said Sue Ellspermann, Indiana’s lieutenant governor and a Fiorina supporter. “And I wonder if that fact would be a perceived disqualifier if she was not female. Ben Carson and Donald Trump have never run for anything.”

Yeah, that’s it — people are just picking on Carly because she’s a woman. If a man had run the demon sheep ad and had not paid vendors after five years, no one would care.

Anyone who’s freelanced has run into people who simply don’t pay you for the work you’ve done for them, and in my experience the wealthy businessmen and major corporations are the worst deadbeats.  They know they can get away with not paying, because small business vendors and individual contractors have no power. Makes me crazy.