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The GOP sure can pick 'em in NY state.
Last go around they offered up "crazy Carl" Paladino, who after an epic campaign of facepalm-inducing blunders snared a whopping 33.3% of the vote to Andrew Cuomo's 62.6%. In the special 2010 election for the Senate, A-list hopefuls (if anyone GOPer in NY still qualifies for that title) stepped back and let the hapless GOP nominee Joseph DioGuardi lose 35/63 to incumbent appointee Kirsten Gillibrand.
The GOP hasn't fielded a serious contender for any statewide office in New York in quite some time.
But 2012 was going to be different! The GOP thought they'd found the ideal candidate in the person of Marc Cenedella to take on Senator Gillibrand as she runs for her first full term. The multi-millionaire CEO of the The Ladders met with GOP party leaders and they were glad to hear he was prepared to self-finance half of the $30-40 million tab for the race. (Whew! The party can then focus on holding the Senate.)
Never mind that the job search company Cenedella founded The Ladders screams "One-percenter!", built on the idea of being an exclusive club of $100K jobs for $100K people. Never mind it has a reputation for over-promising, and under-delivering (kinda like the GOP's trickle-down economic theories) and complaints abounded it lists jobs that don't exist.
Nicholas A. Langworthy, chairman of the Erie County Republican Committee, says, "There are a lot of people within our party encouraged by his candidacy. His overall life experience makes him an excellent candidate for the Senate."
Now, the New York Times has researched Cenedella's internet trail and found that his "life experience" is indeed a colorful one, particularly by GOP standards. Last night they posted: "Under the Name of a Senate Hopeful, Blog Posts on Sex and Drugs."
Oops.
Until recently, a Web site, blog.theladders.com/rock, bore Mr. Cenedella's photograph and the title "The personal blog of Marc Cenedella." It provided tips on polishing résumés, preparing for job interviews and the like. But it also had a number of entries containing random observations about sex, women and drugs.
The entries had headlines like "Sexy vs. Skanky," "Dating Advice for Girly Girls," "He Stole My Weed" and "High Quality Dope."
In an entry titled "A New Holiday for Men," there was a link to a separate site that designates March 14 as a special occasion on which women are encouraged to offer steak and oral sex "to show your man how much you care for him."
Another entry linked to a site that purports to provide biblical justification for a man's having more than one wife. "I wasn't so sure about all this Bible stuff," the entry accompanying the link said, "but I'm starting to cotton to it." Before Mr. Cenedella proceeds any further in his interview process with the voters of New York, it seems like the self-styled job search guru might want to refresh himself with Forbes magazine's Corporate Guide For Social Media. Some relevant notes for CEO Cenedella:- Lead by example. Rules aren't enough. Leaders should model the behavior they would like to see their employees take.
- Show your personality. You weren't hired to be an automaton. Be conversational while remaining professional. If your personal life is one that you (or your employer) don't want to mix up with your work, then consider establishing both private and public profiles, with appropriate sharing settings.
- Stay on the record. Everything you say can (and likely will) be used in the court of public opinion--forever. So assume you're "on the record." Never say anything you wouldn't say to someone's face and in the presence of others. Never use profanity or demeaning language.
One would have hoped that a human resources and internet guru like Cenedella might have already been familiar with these concepts.
When the The New York Times confronted Cenedella about these entries his blog site immediately went dark.
The usual back-paddling and excuse-making ensued. They denied the "personal blog of Marc Cenedella" and was in fact the personal blog of Marc Cenedella, of course.
His campaign says it wasn't really him that posted all that sexist stuff and references to weed and blow jobs. The site, in the words of his campaign, "contained testing content from a wide variety of sources, including spam from automatic spiders."
Sure.
Cenedella may be working overtime to do damage control with women voters. Local NYC blog Gothamist asks: Was Potential GOP Senate Candidate Cenedella Writing A Misogynist Blog? while Wonkette calls Mr. Cenedella's endorsement of "Steak and Blow job day" "cute!" because... ...apparently it's never occurred to Mr. Cenedella that our kind of sort of misogynistic culture doesn't already mandate every other day of the year to be such an occasion?
Hey, at least Mr. Cenedella didn't forward any links to horse porn, so the NY GOP is showing incremental improvement over last cycle.
Via Capital New York, Senator Gillibrand was asked asked about this at an event this morning at New York University. She said: "I think it fundamentally shows a lack of judgment," Gillibrand told reporters at the event at NYU's Kimmel Center. "And I have concerns because I feel like the nature of the rhetoric is very anti-women and very disrespectful and disregards women. And I think it's a matter of judgment that, and a level of inappropriateness, that's not appropriate for anyone seeking any office."
Cross-posted at Daily Kos. |
